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Unconditional handouts benefit recipients and their neighbours: study
- citizenpaul 7y agoSocialism works if you are ok with the living standards of a 3rd world slum. Awesome lets get started....
- nexuist 7y agoAs opposed to urban America, which struggles with endemic crime levels, useless educational structures, and is barely capable of providing clean water. But hey, at least we’re making money for shareholders. We must understand that the economic model does not matter as much as the regulations that govern it. If socialism is implemented in a way that can be overthrown by government officials and their cronies, then it is bound to fail. Similarly, antitrust and consumer protection laws were built to stop juggernaut monopolies from ruining the market. You may have notice those laws haven’t been enforced in the last few decades - there might be a causation between that and our runaway levels of income inequality. Nordic countries seem to have a good balance between capitalism and socialistic policies. It allows them to provide care for their populace while also participating in the global economy. There are no absolutes when talking about systems involving humans.
- dang 7y agoCould you please stop breaking the site guidelines on HN? You've done it quite a bit and we ban accounts that keep doing that. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended, we'd be grateful.
- blackflame 7y agoUnconditional handouts are only good for the person handing things out.
- RHSeeger 7y agoCan you explain your comment? I'm having a hard time understanding how giving someone something without conditinos benefits the giver more than the receiver (or, as you say, _only_ the giver)
- Jamwinner 7y agoI am guessing here, but usually the implication is that you are 'bought' and now even more beholden to a (possibly corrupt) government. I.e. the oft repeated 'if you arent paying, you are the product' mantra. The outlay is somewhat small for the amount of influnce it can have on the lives of people who come to depend on it. It may be irrelevant, or a genuine concern, depending on the context.
- HarryHirsch 7y agoI think he fears that the main effect of a UBI-type program will be raised rents, it will be a transfer of wealth from members of the wealthy class to other members of the wealthy class, something of a Wework-style boondoggle.
- crooked-v 7y agoI feel like the lowest-overhead way to manage such a theoretical would be to have a progressive tax rate that, in the higher brackets, negates the UBI. That is, you give out $X to everybody, but everyone making over $Y+$X total has $X added to their taxes. This feels a little silly on a but-you're-doing-things-twice level, but it lets a UBI program and taxes both operate independently without needing to cross-verify things, which allows for lower overall staffing and less in the way of possible bureaucratic loopholes for people to get stuck in.
- orangecat 7y agoit lets a UBI program and taxes both operate independently without needing to cross-verify things, which allows for lower overall staffing and less in the way of possible bureaucratic loopholes for people to get stuck in. In software engineering terms, it reduces coupling. We do the same thing with Social Security: benefits are taxable so recipients with high incomes end up getting checks and paying some portion of them back, but that's simpler than trying to have the SSA figure out everyone's taxes.
- Jamwinner 7y ago*in certain parts of kenya, according to one study. Does anyone have a link to the actual paper? I think HN knows by now that most publications miss the nuance of most publishings.
- darksaints 7y agoYeah, that's the real problem here. We've long known that limited forms of communism, such as cooperatives and communes, can function extremely well in small self selected populations, but fall apart when they get big enough to be taken advantage of by bad actors. I think there's a future for basic income, but I'm not going put faith in it for broader adoption without vastly broader study.
- farrarstan 7y agoAnd capitalism?
- nine_k 7y agoCapitalism is a system that builds some form of increasing prosperity using people's selfish behaviors. Historically, outright capitalism at scale had outperformed outright communism at scal. Europe is actively experimenting with small admixtures of communism / socialism to overcome some of the shortcomings of capitalism, as they see it.
- farrarstan 7y agohow long do you think history is?
- nine_k 7y agoCapitalism proper only exists for a few centuries.
- jwilk 7y agohttp://emiguel.econ.berkeley.edu/research/general-equilibrium-effects-of-cash-transfers-experimental-evidence-from-kenya http://emiguel.econ.berkeley.edu/research/general-equilibriu...
- thomasfl 7y agoWhy does this and general basic income generate so much anger?
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y agoPeople generally aren’t niave, especially the HN crowd. If there’s a sink (basic income) then there’s certainly a source (YOURE THE SOURCE).
- CuriousSkeptic 7y agoThat’s not how economies work. Money _circulates_. If you’re a sink, you’re also a source (as long as you don’t sink money into inflating some financial bubble instead of buying actual services) So in general it’s the opposite, taking money out of bubble sinks and giving to people who will spend it on services will cause more circulation, not less.
- whytaka 7y agoAngry people want other people to suffer and feel threatened by research and policy proposals that would invalidate their cruelty-as-a-policy.
- Jamwinner 7y agoThis is not a good-faith argument, and strawmanning at best. If you cannot comprehend a view, implied malice is not the obvious fallback.
- whytaka 7y agoWith all due respect, for those people to construe taxation that suggests to actually improve neighbourhoods as "theft" is not good-faith either. It is clearly not theft but rather another means by which societies can invest in themselves. And often, these people wouldn't say the same about taxation that goes into funding the justice system - which is another means for society to improve stability and foster prosperity. But the justice they reach for is punitive, rather than rehabilitative, because again, it's their crab mentality that guides their policies. All in all, I don't attribute the crab mentality as malice but insecurity.
- newnewpdro 7y agoAfter living in a very poor region of the US for a few years, coming from quite affluent areas like Silicon Valley/SF, I've grown to substantially disapprove of handouts. At the local grocery store, 90+% of the people I follow through the cashier lanes are paying for their groceries with EBT. What I see these folks buying is carts full of overpriced packaged foods with out of control kids often carrying tubs of Ben and Jerries ice cream one per child. They are absolutely not spending responsibly and living frugally, their lives of excess are being subsidized and as they say easy come, easy go. When I socialize with the locals, they're all on food stamps and promote it as a way of life if they learn I'm not currently taking handouts. I'm literally peer pressured to get on the EBT program, many have argued they want as many people on it as possible because the more people supported by it the less likely it is to be taken away. These are perfectly capable people who choose to spend their lives horsing around and smoking pot all day. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that, but I do take issue with deliberately abusing social programs to fund it. One annoying effect is because of these programs, I'm surrounded by people whose lives are precariously built upon a system that can vanish rather suddenly from political events like the current president getting elected. There's been murmurings of EBT qualifications changing to cut down spending on these programs, and many expect it to happen should this president be re-elected. If that occurs, the crime in my community (and many like it) is going to absolutely explode because the programs have been supporting lives for too long and these people have grown far too comfortable on unstable ground. When I see a headline "Unconditional handouts benefit recipients and their neighbors" I immediately think to myself "It's not unconditional when the program is conditional on the current government's decision to continue it". When you have large-scale populations becoming entirely dependent on such programs for their livelihoods, and yes, in poor, low-cost areas you can and people will 100% survive off as little as $1000/mo, you have a weaponized community where the trigger for releasing rampant crime and instability concentrated in low-income neighborhoods is the single decision to cut handouts. Now I don't think having these programs is a good idea at all, it seems to create more problems than it solves. I would rather us find ways to wean people off EBT to the point of all but eliminating it, and forget this UBI-like crap unless it's more permanent, like in the form of an amendment to the constitution.
- crooked-v 7y ago
- gonational 7y ago“Unconditional” is a nice euphemism for “free”. There is no such thing as a free handout (and, thusly, an unconditional handout), unless it’s coming in the form of manna from heaven. In these limited studies that don’t affect the inflation rate or the greater macroeconomic picture, there appears to be no conditions, especially none imposed on the recipients. If you expand a study like this, in your mind, to include e.g., the entire population of America, you don’t need to be a PhD economist to see that there are certainly conditions involved.
- dwaltrip 7y agoThere are always at least some constraints on the givers, e.g. there is X amount of money available to be distributed in a given time period. This should not be conflated with conditions that the recipients must first meet. The article is referring to this second type.
- gonational 7y agoThe reason there are no conditions for these recipients is because this is a small, controlled experiment, with outside resources. If you expand this experiment to include the entire population, then each recipient has to meet the condition of welcoming expansion (inflation) of the money supply, each time they receive a payment (unless each recipient is also taxed 100% of what they receive each month). Inflation comes at the expense of savings, and also discourages lending (since the money repaid will be worth less - e.g., Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe, et al). Given the aforementioned circumstances, if you are a saver (with money to lend) OR a borrower (e.g., attempting to grow a business), then you have to accept that these activities will be economically discouraged by the inflationary effects of this income payment system. Only economic inactivity is rewarded (e.g., folks who retire without savings, folks without a job, etc.) without conditions. This is all axiomatic and completely provable with syllogism alone, except for in one scenario: new wealth is discovered (free energy, manna from heaven, altruistic robots, etc.).
- dwaltrip 7y agoNothing is axiomatic in economics. It's not a hard science -- there is too much complexity for us to create highly accurate models yet. It's not proven that UBI will cause inflation uniformly across the board. You can make argument that this will happen. But it is simply wrong to state that it is an obvious mathematical derivation. And once again, the potential systemic impacts of the policy that you are describing are not the same type of thing as a condition that an individual must meet to receive the payment.
- H8crilA 7y agoIf you want a serious analysis of money handouts by a macro hedge fund manager, including how it worked in the past, look up Dalio's PDF on the topic: https://economicprinciples.org/downloads/MMT_%20MP3_MK.pdf https://economicprinciples.org/downloads/MMT_%20MP3_MK.pdf Universal Basic Income is just one of the configurations in which the next big stimulus may be deployed. There's plenty of others, and it's informative to understand the continuum.
- kristianp 7y agohttps://outline.com/NeLHSV https://outline.com/NeLHSV
- nwah1 7y agoBenefit recipients and their landlords. Fixed that for you.