5 ms·

I'm glad this study is happening and I'm excited to see the outcome, but I feel like I ought to caution people who are expecting this to add this to their arsen

by jfasi 8y ago

I'm glad this study is happening and I'm excited to see the outcome, but I feel like I ought to caution people who are expecting this to add this to their arsenal of pro- or anti- UBI arguments in western countries against comparing apples and oranges. My personal prediction is this study will show substantial gains in economic outcomes, health, social standing, etc for all groups that receive money. I'm guessing UBI proponents will leap on the opportunity to advocate for similar programs in western countries. If my prediction is wrong, I'm guessing opposite will happen. I caution that either conclusion would be unjustified because this is not a UBI experiment, this is a charity and aid distribution experiment. The question at hand here isn't "is UBI a wonderful thing" but rather "how do UBI-like distribution methods compare to others?" If you want proof consider that Tavneet Suri's isn't a UBI economist focusing on western countries, "her expertise is as a development economist, specialized in Sub-Saharan Africa" [1] I object to labeling this as a UBI experiment. "Universal Basic Income" is used to describe various proposals to address inequality and unemployment in developed countries where economic gains and jobs are being automated away from the masses of low-skilled workers and up to the elite of high-skilled workers. This is far from the sub-Saharan African context where the economy is still developing and leaders are mulling how best to sustainably extract countries from extreme poverty. [1] http://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty-and-research/faculty-directory/detail/?id=41285 http://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty-and-research/faculty-directo...

ataturk 8y ago
As someone who is friends who two different social workers and related to someone in family court diversions (think: parents getting their kids taken away and want them back) I can tell you that UBI isn't going to solve much of anything. These people have money to buy alcohol and cigarettes, and yet their kids go hungry and rely on school lunch programs, etc. Also, I had a brother in law who was a raging alcoholic and stole money from his grade-school kids' piggy banks. He always had money for beer. Asshole. He did the world a favor and hung himself. For all of them, their personal issues overwhelm their ability to be functional adults. They don't clean their houses, they don't mind their kids, they are addicted to various substances and lie about treatment, recovery, and lie about anything anytime it suits their needs in the moment. It's all lie, lie, lie. There is nothing a UBI or anything else is going to accomplish for these people and it is a myth to believe that payments without oversight or qualifications will lead to positive outcomes. One would think the US's 50 year experiment with welfare would already provide more than enough data to prove that if you subsidize a behavior you get more of it. Let people face death, then see how they act. Take their kids away, first, though. It's not the kids' fault their parents are deadbeats.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > As someone who is friends who two different social workers and related to someone in family court diversions (think: parents getting their kids taken away and want them back) I can tell you that UBI isn't going to solve much of anything. As someone who is friends with a couple different people who teach critical thinking in college and related to one who does so in high school, I can tell you that this argument-from-loose-contact-with-people-who-unnamed-and-unverifiable-alleged-authoirities involves at least two layers of serious fallacy. > One would think the US's 50 year experiment with welfare would already provide more than enough data to prove that if you subsidize a behavior you get more of it. UBI is specifically not about subsidizing behavior; the absence of means- and behavior-testing is what the “U” (either “unconditional” or “universal”) refers to.
  - airstrike 8y ago
    > he absence of means- and behavior-testing is what the “U” (either “unconditional” or “universal”) refers to. Surely you can't expect the effect of UBI to be the same between, say, cardiologists and minimum-wage workers. The parent's point was that it might subsidize behavior of certain groups more than others, and making UBI universal isn't going to solve that because this isn't a very homogeneous universe.
    - throwawayjava 8y ago
      > Surely you can't expect the effect of UBI to be the same between, say, cardiologists and minimum-wage workers Hm. I'd be far more likely to spend my basic income on booze if I were a cardiologist or highly-paid tech worker than if I were a parent barely scraping by. Top-notch scotch and expensive wines instead of middling whiskeys and passable table wines. Of course, some amount might also be donated/saved/invested. But I'd probably spend a far larger percentage of that base UBI payout on luxuries/vices than your typical out-of-work joe. > The parent's point was that it might subsidize behavior of certain groups more than others Not quite. Parent asserts that those behaviors will happen anyways. And that therefore we are more than justified in pulling the carpet out from under those folks (because the money's not going to help anyway). Playing out this same argument in the context of a cardiologist lets us cut to the heart of the ethical differences between typical pro-UBI and anti-UBI arguments. Consider the cardiologist is an absent father who squirrels away his money to avoid supporting his family and then spends that money on various vices (luxuries wine collections, absurdly expensive cigars, etc). Is his employer justified in paying a lower salary? Are his customers/debters justified in not paying up? After all, we discontinued social services for the poor booze hound in the earlier scenario! Most visceral UBI opponents would find that question absurd on face! The money was earned through hard work and education; the employer has no business prying into the employee's personal choices about how to spend his wages, and a customer or debtor refusing to pay is straight-up theft. Conversely, many visceral UBI supporters point out that the work ethic on display in that reasoning becomes outmoded as work itself becomes outmoded. If we don't choose some other metric for decision making, and stick to these ethical imperatives, the conversation more-or-less grounds out here.
theptip 8y ago
I think that you raise an important caveat, but I'm not as pessimistic about the transferability of this evidence; if the general claim against UBI is that it will disincentivize work, but we don't measure any disincentivization in this study, then it is certainly possible that there is a disincentivization effect that kicks in at some higher minimum wage level; however that result would be a strong justification to increase funding for similar research in wealthier economies to see where that effect might (or might not) kick in. And on the other hand, if all of the predictions of the anti-UBI camp are borne out even in a low-income country, then that probably puts a dampener on further research in the US. I don't think this study is going to provide a knock-out blow to either side, but it could significantly bolster the evidence. I object to your objection about labeling this as a UBI experiment ;) To my understanding, the fundamental premise of UBI is that it can replace all charitable programmes, be that aid funding or food stamps. The theory is that the recipient of the basic income knows how best to allocate their spending, better than the entity that is making a transfer with strings attached. You may be correct that in practice UBI looks very different in a low-income country than a high-income country, and perhaps also that they may be funded by different types of organization (NGO vs. government), but I think they can meaningfully be called the same thing.
- Normal_gaussian 8y ago
  Nit: In relation to 'the fundamental premise of UBI is that it can replace all charitable programmes'. This is not the fundamental premise. UBI as a financial leveller or as a minimum support value would be a different number to those in different locations and with different conditions. Location adjusts cost in terms of amenity values (heating, cooling, travel, etc.) - and it is not desirable to clump the population into one location. Condition causes a large variation in living cost - good health is not cheap, but it is cheaper than many temporary, long term, terminal, or permanent conditions. Where UBI does not take these into account - which most don't - there would still be a need for charities and other large scale societal funding mechanisms.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > To my understanding, the fundamental premise of UBI is that it can replace all charitable programmes, be that aid funding or food stamps. No. A common belief among UBI proponents is that it is generally superior to most means-tested public benefit programs, but it is neither generally (though some, especially right libertarian, proponents do argue for this) seen as replacing all other social welfare programs, nor is it generally intended by advocates to replace any charity (which is a different thing entirely than government social welfare programs.) In fact, I would argue that there is no one fundamental premise of UBI, because while it is one broad class of policy conclusion, people come to it from widely divergent premises: the various schools of left-leaning supporters don't share much in terms of premises with right-libertarian supporters, they just have the same answer to very different questions.
loceng 8y ago
True UBI will have to be implemented along with mechanisms where value from automation is integrated with the system - creating a floor for a basic (moving towards good-to-excellent) quality of life for everyone.
RobertoG 8y ago
I think your concerns are valid, but if knowledge about development economics increase, even if it's not applicable to "rich" countries, this is a good thing. I'm a donor, and they had a program where they gave cash to poor people in Kenia and the people explained what they did with the money. It was a very interesting reading. For instance, one of the first, and one of the most common, things people bought was a metallic roof for their home in order to fix leaking. That's something that I, in my urban ignorance, would never predict. Other common investments were: paying the debt with their children's school, a cow, basic furniture or starting a small business.
throwawayjava 8y ago
> This is far from the sub-Saharan African context where the economy is still developing and leaders are mulling how best to sustainably extract countries from extreme poverty. As developing economies continue to develop and pick the lowest-hanging development fruit, it will be interesting to see what happens to these comparisons. I won't be surprised if, in 50 or 100 years, the poorest 5% of the United States is on par with developing countries. By some accounts, that's already kinda-sorta the case [1]. [1] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/How-Poor-are-Americas-Poorest.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/How-Poo...
airstrike 8y ago
> where economic gains and jobs are being automated away from the masses of low-skilled workers and up to the elite of high-skilled workers. Just want to caveat that people tend to make an umbrella claim that automation is killing low-skilled jobs without considering: a. the pervasive and increasingly evident effects of globalizing low-skilled jobs and the very real wage growth in poorer territories including but not limited to China b. that the issue may well be solved by training people so that we have less low-skilled workers (which some argue to be impossible, despite there being no supporting evidence)
- notheguyouthink 8y ago
  > that the issue may well be solved by training people so that we have less low-skilled workers For clarity, do you mean train people so that those truckers become lawyers, software engineers, financial advisors, etcetc? If so, I feel like at best that is a statement missing a second part. Ie, I don't think existing "high skilled" job markets could handle an influx of what I imagine is at least double the staffing. I imagine it would immediately result in millions of people without jobs, regardless of qualifications. So the second part of that is, we'd need to drastically expand the available jobs in those "high skilled" markets. And I've got no idea how we'd do that. What are all those extra software engineers going to work on? What are those extra lawyers going to do? etc.
  - airstrike 8y ago
    At the onset of the Industrial Revolution, I don't imagine people could answer similar questions if asked. If we managed to absorb most of the Western world's farming population into massive cities and created entirely new industries, who's to say the same can't be done now? A massive part of the planet is still "underdeveloped". As these countries emerge from their eternally-emerging state, there should be no shortage of demand that high-skilled workers in developed countries can capitalize on. Creating intellectual property is an extremely rewarding enterprise and one that can be sold to other less skilled nations (as is already the case).
Upper_Onion 8y ago
This is more like Universal Commie Income. It's not surprising people on hackernews support this, tech guys in silicon valley tend to be Soyboy Marxists. 149 million died in the 20th century from similar expermints where the state pillages the upper class and redistributes the wealth. Eventually resuling in starvation and collapse (https://scottmanning.com/content/communist-body-count/ https://scottmanning.com/content/communist-body-count/) Getting the state to steal someones labor and then give it to someone else is the definition of theft. Fuck. Universal. Theft. Income
LifeLiverTransp 8y ago
UBI will change nothing. People who could benefit are "tidal"-locked in bad economic dependencies. If you live in a trailer park- and recive UBI- all that happens is that the landowner or landlord raises the rent to meet the new income you recive.
- nkoren 8y ago
  From TFA: > “It is easy to have opinions without evidence,” Suri said. “It is time we tried to gather some evidence and started thinking about what the impacts truly are and how it changes people’s lives.”
- munk-a 8y ago
  It won't scale like that, costs of living will likely adjust up slightly but your landlord is fighting the grocery store for your additional income, ask too high and they'll lose a tenant. Inflationary shifts like this have been shown to balance out pretty well and a UBI will reduce the ridiculousness of the income disparity by devaluing highly concentrated wealth.
fnordsensei 8y ago
The "universal" part of "Universal Basic Income" is very hard to cover. Maybe it's time to mint "LBI"/"Localized Basic Income" (sounds more like it's addressing the spatial dimension) or "Limited Basic Income" (perhaps covers the temporal dimension better.)
ace_of_spades 8y ago
funny thing is... there have already been basic income experiments in north america in the 70s [1]. As far as I know all experiments so far have never shown any substantial negative side effects and tended to show positive effects on work morale, etc. There has just not been the political will to try it on a large scale, yet. Might have to do with the fact that UBI will have a huge impact on the state and its duties. It takes courage for an organization to basically remove what has become a large part of its raison d‘etre. 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome

by jfasi 8y ago

ataturk 8y ago

As someone who is friends who two different social workers and related to someone in family court diversions (think: parents getting their kids taken away and want them back) I can tell you that UBI isn't going to solve much of anything. These people have money to buy alcohol and cigarettes, and yet their kids go hungry and rely on school lunch programs, etc. Also, I had a brother in law who was a raging alcoholic and stole money from his grade-school kids' piggy banks. He always had money for beer. Asshole. He did the world a favor and hung himself. For all of them, their personal issues overwhelm their ability to be functional adults. They don't clean their houses, they don't mind their kids, they are addicted to various substances and lie about treatment, recovery, and lie about anything anytime it suits their needs in the moment. It's all lie, lie, lie. There is nothing a UBI or anything else is going to accomplish for these people and it is a myth to believe that payments without oversight or qualifications will lead to positive outcomes. One would think the US's 50 year experiment with welfare would already provide more than enough data to prove that if you subsidize a behavior you get more of it. Let people face death, then see how they act. Take their kids away, first, though. It's not the kids' fault their parents are deadbeats.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> As someone who is friends who two different social workers and related to someone in family court diversions (think: parents getting their kids taken away and want them back) I can tell you that UBI isn't going to solve much of anything. As someone who is friends with a couple different people who teach critical thinking in college and related to one who does so in high school, I can tell you that this argument-from-loose-contact-with-people-who-unnamed-and-unverifiable-alleged-authoirities involves at least two layers of serious fallacy. > One would think the US's 50 year experiment with welfare would already provide more than enough data to prove that if you subsidize a behavior you get more of it. UBI is specifically not about subsidizing behavior; the absence of means- and behavior-testing is what the “U” (either “unconditional” or “universal”) refers to.
- airstrike 8y ago
  > he absence of means- and behavior-testing is what the “U” (either “unconditional” or “universal”) refers to. Surely you can't expect the effect of UBI to be the same between, say, cardiologists and minimum-wage workers. The parent's point was that it might subsidize behavior of certain groups more than others, and making UBI universal isn't going to solve that because this isn't a very homogeneous universe.
  - throwawayjava 8y ago
    > Surely you can't expect the effect of UBI to be the same between, say, cardiologists and minimum-wage workers Hm. I'd be far more likely to spend my basic income on booze if I were a cardiologist or highly-paid tech worker than if I were a parent barely scraping by. Top-notch scotch and expensive wines instead of middling whiskeys and passable table wines. Of course, some amount might also be donated/saved/invested. But I'd probably spend a far larger percentage of that base UBI payout on luxuries/vices than your typical out-of-work joe. > The parent's point was that it might subsidize behavior of certain groups more than others Not quite. Parent asserts that those behaviors will happen anyways. And that therefore we are more than justified in pulling the carpet out from under those folks (because the money's not going to help anyway). Playing out this same argument in the context of a cardiologist lets us cut to the heart of the ethical differences between typical pro-UBI and anti-UBI arguments. Consider the cardiologist is an absent father who squirrels away his money to avoid supporting his family and then spends that money on various vices (luxuries wine collections, absurdly expensive cigars, etc). Is his employer justified in paying a lower salary? Are his customers/debters justified in not paying up? After all, we discontinued social services for the poor booze hound in the earlier scenario! Most visceral UBI opponents would find that question absurd on face! The money was earned through hard work and education; the employer has no business prying into the employee's personal choices about how to spend his wages, and a customer or debtor refusing to pay is straight-up theft. Conversely, many visceral UBI supporters point out that the work ethic on display in that reasoning becomes outmoded as work itself becomes outmoded. If we don't choose some other metric for decision making, and stick to these ethical imperatives, the conversation more-or-less grounds out here.

theptip 8y ago

I think that you raise an important caveat, but I'm not as pessimistic about the transferability of this evidence; if the general claim against UBI is that it will disincentivize work, but we don't measure any disincentivization in this study, then it is certainly possible that there is a disincentivization effect that kicks in at some higher minimum wage level; however that result would be a strong justification to increase funding for similar research in wealthier economies to see where that effect might (or might not) kick in. And on the other hand, if all of the predictions of the anti-UBI camp are borne out even in a low-income country, then that probably puts a dampener on further research in the US. I don't think this study is going to provide a knock-out blow to either side, but it could significantly bolster the evidence. I object to your objection about labeling this as a UBI experiment ;) To my understanding, the fundamental premise of UBI is that it can replace all charitable programmes, be that aid funding or food stamps. The theory is that the recipient of the basic income knows how best to allocate their spending, better than the entity that is making a transfer with strings attached. You may be correct that in practice UBI looks very different in a low-income country than a high-income country, and perhaps also that they may be funded by different types of organization (NGO vs. government), but I think they can meaningfully be called the same thing.

Normal_gaussian 8y ago
Nit: In relation to 'the fundamental premise of UBI is that it can replace all charitable programmes'. This is not the fundamental premise. UBI as a financial leveller or as a minimum support value would be a different number to those in different locations and with different conditions. Location adjusts cost in terms of amenity values (heating, cooling, travel, etc.) - and it is not desirable to clump the population into one location. Condition causes a large variation in living cost - good health is not cheap, but it is cheaper than many temporary, long term, terminal, or permanent conditions. Where UBI does not take these into account - which most don't - there would still be a need for charities and other large scale societal funding mechanisms.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> To my understanding, the fundamental premise of UBI is that it can replace all charitable programmes, be that aid funding or food stamps. No. A common belief among UBI proponents is that it is generally superior to most means-tested public benefit programs, but it is neither generally (though some, especially right libertarian, proponents do argue for this) seen as replacing all other social welfare programs, nor is it generally intended by advocates to replace any charity (which is a different thing entirely than government social welfare programs.) In fact, I would argue that there is no one fundamental premise of UBI, because while it is one broad class of policy conclusion, people come to it from widely divergent premises: the various schools of left-leaning supporters don't share much in terms of premises with right-libertarian supporters, they just have the same answer to very different questions.

loceng 8y ago

True UBI will have to be implemented along with mechanisms where value from automation is integrated with the system - creating a floor for a basic (moving towards good-to-excellent) quality of life for everyone.

RobertoG 8y ago

I think your concerns are valid, but if knowledge about development economics increase, even if it's not applicable to "rich" countries, this is a good thing. I'm a donor, and they had a program where they gave cash to poor people in Kenia and the people explained what they did with the money. It was a very interesting reading. For instance, one of the first, and one of the most common, things people bought was a metallic roof for their home in order to fix leaking. That's something that I, in my urban ignorance, would never predict. Other common investments were: paying the debt with their children's school, a cow, basic furniture or starting a small business.

throwawayjava 8y ago

> This is far from the sub-Saharan African context where the economy is still developing and leaders are mulling how best to sustainably extract countries from extreme poverty. As developing economies continue to develop and pick the lowest-hanging development fruit, it will be interesting to see what happens to these comparisons. I won't be surprised if, in 50 or 100 years, the poorest 5% of the United States is on par with developing countries. By some accounts, that's already kinda-sorta the case [1]. [1] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/How-Poor-are-Americas-Poorest.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/How-Poo...

airstrike 8y ago

> where economic gains and jobs are being automated away from the masses of low-skilled workers and up to the elite of high-skilled workers. Just want to caveat that people tend to make an umbrella claim that automation is killing low-skilled jobs without considering: a. the pervasive and increasingly evident effects of globalizing low-skilled jobs and the very real wage growth in poorer territories including but not limited to China b. that the issue may well be solved by training people so that we have less low-skilled workers (which some argue to be impossible, despite there being no supporting evidence)

notheguyouthink 8y ago
> that the issue may well be solved by training people so that we have less low-skilled workers For clarity, do you mean train people so that those truckers become lawyers, software engineers, financial advisors, etcetc? If so, I feel like at best that is a statement missing a second part. Ie, I don't think existing "high skilled" job markets could handle an influx of what I imagine is at least double the staffing. I imagine it would immediately result in millions of people without jobs, regardless of qualifications. So the second part of that is, we'd need to drastically expand the available jobs in those "high skilled" markets. And I've got no idea how we'd do that. What are all those extra software engineers going to work on? What are those extra lawyers going to do? etc.
- airstrike 8y ago
  At the onset of the Industrial Revolution, I don't imagine people could answer similar questions if asked. If we managed to absorb most of the Western world's farming population into massive cities and created entirely new industries, who's to say the same can't be done now? A massive part of the planet is still "underdeveloped". As these countries emerge from their eternally-emerging state, there should be no shortage of demand that high-skilled workers in developed countries can capitalize on. Creating intellectual property is an extremely rewarding enterprise and one that can be sold to other less skilled nations (as is already the case).

Upper_Onion 8y ago

This is more like Universal Commie Income. It's not surprising people on hackernews support this, tech guys in silicon valley tend to be Soyboy Marxists. 149 million died in the 20th century from similar expermints where the state pillages the upper class and redistributes the wealth. Eventually resuling in starvation and collapse (https://scottmanning.com/content/communist-body-count/ https://scottmanning.com/content/communist-body-count/) Getting the state to steal someones labor and then give it to someone else is the definition of theft. Fuck. Universal. Theft. Income

LifeLiverTransp 8y ago

UBI will change nothing. People who could benefit are "tidal"-locked in bad economic dependencies. If you live in a trailer park- and recive UBI- all that happens is that the landowner or landlord raises the rent to meet the new income you recive.

nkoren 8y ago
From TFA: > “It is easy to have opinions without evidence,” Suri said. “It is time we tried to gather some evidence and started thinking about what the impacts truly are and how it changes people’s lives.”
munk-a 8y ago
It won't scale like that, costs of living will likely adjust up slightly but your landlord is fighting the grocery store for your additional income, ask too high and they'll lose a tenant. Inflationary shifts like this have been shown to balance out pretty well and a UBI will reduce the ridiculousness of the income disparity by devaluing highly concentrated wealth.

fnordsensei 8y ago

The "universal" part of "Universal Basic Income" is very hard to cover. Maybe it's time to mint "LBI"/"Localized Basic Income" (sounds more like it's addressing the spatial dimension) or "Limited Basic Income" (perhaps covers the temporal dimension better.)

ace_of_spades 8y ago

funny thing is... there have already been basic income experiments in north america in the 70s [1]. As far as I know all experiments so far have never shown any substantial negative side effects and tended to show positive effects on work morale, etc. There has just not been the political will to try it on a large scale, yet. Might have to do with the fact that UBI will have a huge impact on the state and its duties. It takes courage for an organization to basically remove what has become a large part of its raison d‘etre. 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome