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Then there’s the behavioral factor to consider. Will UBI truly relieve pressure and give people a hand up? Or will it result in a large swathe of the population

Then there’s the behavioral factor to consider. Will UBI truly relieve pressure and give people a hand up? Or will it result in a large swathe of the population dropping out of the labor force and accepting a life of poverty and marginalization? Could some UBI pushers actually see the latter as the true goal? Ask any Native American how empowering a UBI-esque system worked out for them. Not that I’m rejecting the idea of UBI out of hand, but I’m very concerned about the lack of such discussion.

jostylr 7y ago
There is a Native American example with UBI (North Carolina, casino-based UBI) and it sounds like it immediately improved outcomes and did not impact working: https://thecorrespondent.com/4664/why-do-the-poor-make-such-poor-decisions/179307480-39a74caf https://thecorrespondent.com/4664/why-do-the-poor-make-such-... Also, would you stop working if you got 12k a year for free? How much do the wealthy make in dividends a year? Do they stop working? Maybe to ensure that the wealthy continue to work, we should prevent any kind of returns on capital investment. Maybe people should only make money through their labor? But seriously, who wants to do nothing all day long? The UBI money takes away stresses and maybe some will stop working for a boss, but they will find other things to do with their time and, if it is valuable to others, they will profit from it and do it more. So it goes.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  As a personal anecdote, I would love volunteering with building homes, helping elderly, or helping animal conservation and rehabilitation efforts. I would also like to work on some inventions (I'm a mechanical engineer). However, volunteering doesn't pay anything and inventing something is really risky, so as a result I can't contribute in such ways to society and instead am working at a job I hate contributing to my deteriorating quality of life and mental health (i feel like a slave working towards having enough money to buy myself from my owner).
  - echelon 7y ago
    > However, volunteering doesn't pay anything and inventing something is really risky, so as a result I can't contribute in such ways to society and instead am working at a job I hate contributing to my deteriorating quality of life and mental health (i feel like a slave working towards having enough money to buy myself from my owner). I often wonder how many people feel this. I don't feel quite as dire about it, but I absolutely agree that my best contributions to society will be those I initiate and see to fruition on my own accord. Unfortunately, I too have many ideas, yet so little time to work on them. It's too risky to quit work and embark on my own, so I only get 1/10th of my vision done during the evening and weekend hours I can spare. And even then I'm burning the last remaining cycles of effort I have during the day. It's a slow, painful slog. But I am making progress. If I were in the flip side position of being a CEO with a product vision and lots of workers to see my ideas through to fruition, how many of my employees would be stuck in the same trough of apparent underutilization and under-fulfillment? If I empowered them to follow their own path and dreams, wouldn't they quit and leave me with nobody to work on my vision? If you get rid of the perhaps boring and mundane "keeping the lights on" jobs, which are ever so important, then the product dies. This is a hard problem.
    - hanniabu 7y ago
      > my best contributions to society will be those I initiate and see to fruition on my own accord This is pretty much the essence I was getting at and what the goal is to solve
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  > Also, would you stop working if you got 12k a year for free? Please define “free”. It’s not free. It’s just other people’s money. The scheme is literally we’ll collect money from everyone and then give it back. If everyone has an extra 12k... NO ONE has an extra 12k. >Who wants to do nothing all day long? Oh. You might want to venture outside of your bubble a bit.
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't post inflammatory things or cross into personal attack, regardless of how wrong some other comment is or you feel it is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Faark 7y ago
  > Who wants to do nothing all day long? As someone having participated in a support group for people excessively using online/digital media: It might not be a very satisfying life, but it's seems easier than ever to distract yourself while unproductively wasting your time. For some of those individuals, this was about not wasting their limited time outside work. But a significant share had their lives entirely supported by e.g. gov or parents. And external factors in many cases caused the necessity to change. I agree with society ensuring people can have their basic needs met. But why does it have to be an unconditional monthly check? Beside strong support offers in areas like psychological, guidance or life advice, I'd prefer the right to trade X hours per week (preferably more like 20ish than the current 40) to your gov to get what you need to live. It would act as a minimum wage. It would incentivize finding something better, especially if not satisfied with the work assigned by gov to you. It would still guide those living on autopilot towards something at least somewhat productive. And yeah, it would be tricky to implement well :/
jandrewrogers 7y ago
Tribal UBI has had mixed outcomes. Payments that are below practical livability seem to help as an augmentation to income and for reducing poverty. In tribes where work is not necessary or limited to a couple months per year to live comfortably (the latter case common for tribes with a large resource extraction business) you see much more evidence of rampant social pathology rather than mere poverty. Anecdotally, having grown up in and around various tribal communities, people will consistently replace work as a source of purpose with some other purpose of their own devising. Unfortunately, most of the time people will choose a purpose that is socially destructive in the absence of a default purpose that is socially beneficial. A consideration for designing a constructive UBI system is institutionalizing new sources of socially beneficial purpose that can be easily adopted by people that lose work as a purpose. Insufficient thought is put into this latter problem, I have seen little evidence that this will happen organically.

jostylr 7y ago

There is a Native American example with UBI (North Carolina, casino-based UBI) and it sounds like it immediately improved outcomes and did not impact working: https://thecorrespondent.com/4664/why-do-the-poor-make-such-poor-decisions/179307480-39a74caf https://thecorrespondent.com/4664/why-do-the-poor-make-such-... Also, would you stop working if you got 12k a year for free? How much do the wealthy make in dividends a year? Do they stop working? Maybe to ensure that the wealthy continue to work, we should prevent any kind of returns on capital investment. Maybe people should only make money through their labor? But seriously, who wants to do nothing all day long? The UBI money takes away stresses and maybe some will stop working for a boss, but they will find other things to do with their time and, if it is valuable to others, they will profit from it and do it more. So it goes.

hanniabu 7y ago
As a personal anecdote, I would love volunteering with building homes, helping elderly, or helping animal conservation and rehabilitation efforts. I would also like to work on some inventions (I'm a mechanical engineer). However, volunteering doesn't pay anything and inventing something is really risky, so as a result I can't contribute in such ways to society and instead am working at a job I hate contributing to my deteriorating quality of life and mental health (i feel like a slave working towards having enough money to buy myself from my owner).
- echelon 7y ago
  > However, volunteering doesn't pay anything and inventing something is really risky, so as a result I can't contribute in such ways to society and instead am working at a job I hate contributing to my deteriorating quality of life and mental health (i feel like a slave working towards having enough money to buy myself from my owner). I often wonder how many people feel this. I don't feel quite as dire about it, but I absolutely agree that my best contributions to society will be those I initiate and see to fruition on my own accord. Unfortunately, I too have many ideas, yet so little time to work on them. It's too risky to quit work and embark on my own, so I only get 1/10th of my vision done during the evening and weekend hours I can spare. And even then I'm burning the last remaining cycles of effort I have during the day. It's a slow, painful slog. But I am making progress. If I were in the flip side position of being a CEO with a product vision and lots of workers to see my ideas through to fruition, how many of my employees would be stuck in the same trough of apparent underutilization and under-fulfillment? If I empowered them to follow their own path and dreams, wouldn't they quit and leave me with nobody to work on my vision? If you get rid of the perhaps boring and mundane "keeping the lights on" jobs, which are ever so important, then the product dies. This is a hard problem.
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    > my best contributions to society will be those I initiate and see to fruition on my own accord This is pretty much the essence I was getting at and what the goal is to solve
SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
> Also, would you stop working if you got 12k a year for free? Please define “free”. It’s not free. It’s just other people’s money. The scheme is literally we’ll collect money from everyone and then give it back. If everyone has an extra 12k... NO ONE has an extra 12k. >Who wants to do nothing all day long? Oh. You might want to venture outside of your bubble a bit.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't post inflammatory things or cross into personal attack, regardless of how wrong some other comment is or you feel it is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Faark 7y ago
> Who wants to do nothing all day long? As someone having participated in a support group for people excessively using online/digital media: It might not be a very satisfying life, but it's seems easier than ever to distract yourself while unproductively wasting your time. For some of those individuals, this was about not wasting their limited time outside work. But a significant share had their lives entirely supported by e.g. gov or parents. And external factors in many cases caused the necessity to change. I agree with society ensuring people can have their basic needs met. But why does it have to be an unconditional monthly check? Beside strong support offers in areas like psychological, guidance or life advice, I'd prefer the right to trade X hours per week (preferably more like 20ish than the current 40) to your gov to get what you need to live. It would act as a minimum wage. It would incentivize finding something better, especially if not satisfied with the work assigned by gov to you. It would still guide those living on autopilot towards something at least somewhat productive. And yeah, it would be tricky to implement well :/

jandrewrogers 7y ago

Tribal UBI has had mixed outcomes. Payments that are below practical livability seem to help as an augmentation to income and for reducing poverty. In tribes where work is not necessary or limited to a couple months per year to live comfortably (the latter case common for tribes with a large resource extraction business) you see much more evidence of rampant social pathology rather than mere poverty. Anecdotally, having grown up in and around various tribal communities, people will consistently replace work as a source of purpose with some other purpose of their own devising. Unfortunately, most of the time people will choose a purpose that is socially destructive in the absence of a default purpose that is socially beneficial. A consideration for designing a constructive UBI system is institutionalizing new sources of socially beneficial purpose that can be easily adopted by people that lose work as a purpose. Insufficient thought is put into this latter problem, I have seen little evidence that this will happen organically.