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This is very misleading reporting. First: All studies so far show a pretty consistent ~10% work disincentive. This is what all the detractors say when they say

This is very misleading reporting. First: All studies so far show a pretty consistent ~10% work disincentive. This is what all the detractors say when they say it disincentivizes work. So how about this one? From actually reading the study's conclusion: > Slightly less than one-fifth were employed before but unemployed during the pilot (17%) So even worse than what we've seen so far. 17% dropping out of the labor market when its a short-term study is huge. For the ~10% figure, Chris Stucchio has a fairly succinct roundup of the work disincentive of other studies so far: https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2019/basic_income_reduces_employment.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2019/basic_income_reduces... ~~~ Personal opinion: If you consider multi-generational entrenchments of poverty as its own problem, worth serious merit, then the work disincentive could be a disaster. In UBI long run, the children of parents who have never worked are probably going to be at a large disadvantage. I think its already a problem today for children of SSI recipient parents (even compared to children of SSDI parents), but its not easy to prove.

daemonk 7y ago
What are the demographics of those that dropped out of the work force? Didn't some UBI studies observe that while there are people that dropped out of the workforce, these people consisted of mothers that can now go back to child rearing or younger people that can now pursue an education?
- simonsarris 7y ago
  It is extremely unfortunate but studies like this are almost always done by people with somewhat close-ended goals. This research in this one is mostly self reports, and then, mostly "did free money make you feel better?" They are not recording, or interested in recording, the nature of who dropped out of the workforce and why, even though that seems like far more important, and somewhat more empirical, information.
  - 52-6F-62 7y ago
    In your criticism you are missing some crucial details surrounding this report. This is essentially scrounging to make the most out of what was a single, but fully budgeted, study on BI with the intention of running more studies. The study was cancelled by the incoming government out of spite. All people who set up plans, knowing the full length of the study beforehand were suddenly tossed out of the program and it was just down, including any study occurring. They're trying to gather what and any information they can from the program that wasn't even given the chance to run to completion. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/basic-income-pilot-project-ford-cancel-1.4771343 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/basic-income-pilot-project-fo...
- deleted 7y ago
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- jbeales 7y ago
  Not really demographics, but from the article: > while some people did stop working, about half of them headed back to school in hopes of coming back to a better job.
- 76543210 7y ago
  Child rearing seems like a waste of talent. Our high cost of education should be teaching people to create more value than the 15k/yr of value it is raising a child before the age of 5.(daycare costs, 4 children per 1 adult) As an ancedote, it seems part time mothers are significantly happier than stay at home moms.
  - rocmcd 7y ago
    Trying to distill 'child rearing' to $15k/year and calling it a 'waste of talent' is absurd. Not everything can (and should) be broken down into a monetary amount and optimized for. You can classify anything as a 'waste of talent' when looking through this lens. Are you a software engineer? If so, then doing literally anything apart from developing software is a 'waste of talent'. Cleaning dishes? Gardening? Exercising?
    - 76543210 7y ago
      Yes, having a software engineer cleaning dishes for a restaurant is a waste of talent. Maybe if overtime was flexible, you could suggest hiring unskilled workers to do those tasks at home. I love my kid, but it's not like he's learning cutting edge stuff that requires an engineer to teach them. And there's many hours in the evenings and weekends we spend together where he learns how his dad behaves.
      - refurb 7y ago
        A huge part of growing up is developing bonds, understanding relationships and getting your kid on a firm footing so they can deal with what the world throws at them. A lot of that develop happens when they are not learning, or at least you don’t think they are.
        76543210 7y ago
        I've been working full time and my kid gets excited to see me every day. The bond is there. If you really want to turn this around, imagine how dependent a child would be on a parent if they never used a babysitter.
lidHanteyk 7y ago
As long as our government doesn't have a public service with an unlimited supply of entry-level jobs, it is disingenuous to talk about poverty as only endable by work. Poverty can be ended by money as well, and given that poverty is defined by (lack of) money, it doesn't seem right to focus on work.
stevenwoo 7y ago
Your link leaves out the study of the Alaska Permanent Fund https://www.nber.org/papers/w24312 https://www.nber.org/papers/w24312 I believe it's left out because it contradicts the premise - it found more people actually looked for work because prior to the Alaska payment they were too poor to venture far from home.
- jonathankoren 7y ago
  Similar findings are repeated all across the social safety net. For example, the Scandinavian countries with their robust social programs routinely top lists for ease of entrepreneurship. [0] (e.g. Losing health insurance is big disincentive to starting a new company.) There are also have been repeated studies that found that financial stress causes people to perform worse on cognitive tasks, and removing that stressor increases performance.[1][2] [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/eshachhabra/2016/07/24/why-the-nordics-are-the-best-place-to-run-a-business-and-live/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/eshachhabra/2016/07/24/why-the-... [1] https://www.citylab.com/life/2013/08/how-poverty-taxes-brain/6716/ https://www.citylab.com/life/2013/08/how-poverty-taxes-brain... [2] https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2018/preliminary/paper/yaYn2DYb https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2018/preliminary/paper/yaY...
  - refurb 7y ago
    Ease of entrepreneurship might be high, but actual entrepreneurship lags the US where a much weaker social safety net exists. Ow do you explain that?
    - jonathankoren 7y ago
      You’re connecting two irrelevant things. Look at Sweden. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/09/sweden-startups/541413/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/09/sweden-...
    - crooked-v 7y ago
      Sweden has 10 million people. The U.S. has 300 million.
patentatt 7y ago
I think it would be hugely advantageous to my children if they had two parents who could dedicate themselves full time to raising them. In what world is having a parent stressed out and absent most of the time good for kids?
crystaln 7y ago
Part of the reason for ubi is that a lot of work is exploitative or underpaid. Ubi puts people in a negotiating position to not work and demand higher payment, or to not work and contribute to society in other ways.
- Kalium 7y ago
  Might it be worth considering that choosing to not work and choosing to contribute to society in other ways could, for some people and in some circumstances, be slightly different decisions?
  - a0zU 7y ago
    There are absolutely people who would contribute to society in other ways but there are also people who would not work, not contribute and, sit in their rooms all day not having the will to do anything but debate with strangers on internet forums(lol). In my opinion the problem with UBI is that it would take away the necessity for people to do something to survive and it would make a significant minority of the population miserable because they wouldn't have to do anything but consume.
    - loa_in_ 7y ago
      There is a lot of things to do other than consume. Even if it's learning to write poetry
      - a0zU 7y ago
        Absolutely, there are plenty of things to do other than consume and there are definetly people who would discover that they had a talent at writing poetry, but doing those things require effort that a significant minority would not be ready or willing to make, and consummation is incredibly appealing to those who aren't strong enough to put effort into anything else.
    - Shacklz 7y ago
      > In my opinion the problem with UBI is that it would take away the necessity for people to do something to survive and it would make a significant minority of the population miserable With all due respect, but this opinion reeks of someone who actually has the ability to choose his own job, say no to exploitative employment-practices, all while actually getting payed decently. Someone who has to work a shit job they hate for a salary that barely pays the bills because they simply have no other option might as well be miserable because of this situation. This endless slog they cannot escape, a treadmill they despise but have no other choice than to keep going. And let's not kid ourselves - there are _a lot_ of people out there who are doing jobs they don't want to do, or at least wouldn't want to do for the kind of salary they receive.
shkkmo 7y ago
That is a pretty misleading assessment of the study: > Overall, there was a slight reduction in the number employed during the pilot compared to the number employed prior to the pilot. Ten respondents moved from unemployment to employment while 32 moved from employment to unemployment. Of the participants who moved from employment to unemployment, 13 (40.6%) enrolled in full-time education during the pilot with the intention of re-entering the labour market later as more qualified workers. The work disincentive seems well below 10%. > If you consider multi-generational entrenchments of poverty as its own problem, worth serious merit, then the work disincentive could be a disaster. The meta study you linked to shows a marked difference in the effect across genders. It seems pretty likely that a reduction in the labor force would caused by a significant factor by families where both parents work, and one has the ability to stay home with the kids. I don't see any data here talking about an increase in household where neither parent works. I suspect that any decrease that does exist, applies to single-parent households. When you take this into account alongside the number of these the "work disincentived" that are people moving into full-time education programs, it doesn't seem obvious at all that here will be a negative effect on multi-generational poverty. Finally, that article seems to lack a basic understanding of economics. A reduction in employment due to reductions in the job supply (such as during a recession) is in no way equivalent to a reduction in employment due to reductions in the labor supply. When you reduce the job supply, you reduce consumer income due to job loss / wage reductions, this compounds to further lower economic activity and thus leads to more reduction in the job supply. When you reduce labor supply through UBI, you don't see the same drop in consumer income, and wages should actually go up.
awakeasleep 7y ago
The end of slavery was also a huge disincentive to work
- hirundo 7y ago
  Is starvation really less of an incentive to work than being beaten?
jonnycomputer 7y ago
Sounds like UBI gave them the negotiating power to decline jobs that did not meet their needs, were too exploitive, were not in alignment with their goals, and so on. That's part of the point: to increase labor power.
danenania 7y ago
"If you consider multi-generational entrenchments of poverty as its own problem, worth serious merit, then the work disincentive could be a disaster." Multi-generational entrenchments of poverty are already a disaster, and not because of fuzzy ideas like "instilling a work ethic", but because many millions of people lack the basic material resources needed to fulfill anything close to their potential. A kid watching their parents break their backs as minimum-wage slaves living paycheck to paycheck doesn't prepare them to do anything other than the same thing with their lives.
- Aunche 7y ago
  > millions of people lack the basic material resources needed to fulfill anything close to their potential There is a limited amount of capital in the world. Distributing it now might help those at home, but it does not help the billion people who still lack electricity. There simply is not enough capital in the world to build trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure for free. Investment is a much better vehicle for distribution than UBI as it also creates wealth.
  - danenania 7y ago
    "There is a limited amount of capital in the world." You've already lost me. This is provably false, as any programmer should know: if you sit down and code something useful today, you've just increased the amount of capital in the world. Out of thin air. A carpenter who buys a bunch of lumber and turns it into a thousand-dollar piece of furniture does the same. The more people can learn to add value to the world, and the more value they can add, the bigger the total pie of wealth can grow. Investment distributes wealth primarily from the elite to the slightly-less elite. It doesn't break the cycle of poverty and immediate survival focus that prevents millions and millions of potential Einsteins or Feynmans or Musks from doing anything with their lives other than scraping by.
    - Aunche 7y ago
      I mean that there isn't enough capital to distribute to everyone in the world, not that it's fixed forever. You can grow it. That's my point. It's better to increase capital than redistribute it. > Investment distributes wealth primarily from the elite to the slightly-less elite. If you've seen how China changed in the last couple decades, you'd see how this obviously isn't true. Basically all electronics are manufactured in a developing Asian country by the children of subsidence farmers.
mfer 7y ago
I know and know of many people who don't want to work or contribute to society. Sitting at home and not contributing to society is kind of a goal. Some groups are negative to those who try to work or contribute. I know families who have passed that on from parents to children. This isn't everyone but it is a segment. I don't see much talk about this. The folks in this segment aren't bound to be on HN. I point this out just as a piece of information. There are opportunities in that. Maybe not to make a bunch of money but to understand people and maybe help some.
- vharuck 7y ago
  I don't think an economic system should be used as a blunt weapon to punish perceived immorality.
  - mfer 7y ago
    I added my comment as a data point. One that I find is often overlooked or not talked about. How that data point is considered is something else. As for how an economic system considers perceives immorality is a long winded conversation. Which economic system? What are rewards vs weapons in that economic system? For example, an economic system could reward work with money and not make money a given. Part of the idea is to look at rewards and how they work in a culture as well.
- pault 7y ago
  Would the world be worse off if people who have no interest in working and will siphon off as much money as they can from their employer until they get fired left the workforce? Those jobs would be freed up for people that actually want them.
zelon88 7y ago
Also can you understand why I'm not shocked that an American-born statistician choosing to live in a third world country has evidence to support UBI being a bad idea?
koonsolo 7y ago
One other thing to add to it: The community in the experiment were not self sustained. What I mean is that extra money was pumped into this experiment. In real life the money needs to come from that same community, which boils down to increased taxes on labor. I would love to see the statistics on work incentive when your taxes double on that same work.
TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
The fallacy in that argument is that you're equating "dropping out of the labour market" with doing absolutely nothing of any value. For life. The other side of the fallacy is that any occupation based on investment or speculation is essentially parasitic, unless it includes a rare commitment to stick with an enterprise until it's a net benefit to all stakeholders. (Not just shareholders and the board.) The latter occupations are "in the labour market" but still making a net negative contribution. Essentially you're attempting to frame this as if UBI encourages freeloading. In fact the most influential freeloading is mostly at the other end - and the fact that it's considered a heroic and noble kind of sanctioned freeloading doesn't change its basic nature. So unless you're sure that everyone who is temporarily out of the labour market does nothing of value to anyone, ever, and also that their negative influence is worse than that of speculators and rent-seekers, it's hard to be convinced that this is a serious problem. The other issue - social capital - is a complete different problem. People who are in work don't necessarily have access to social capital either. But as a rule it's easier to start a business with a safety net than without one. UBI could always be associated with opportunities for extended education. Money alone is rarely the issue, and there aren't many downsides to extended adult ed.
larrywright 7y ago
Do these studies account for people who drop out of the workforce to pursue education or training? It seems like that would be one of the benefits: allowing someone who is under skilled and working a low skill job to quit and focus on acquiring the skills they need to get a higher paying job.
- 52-6F-62 7y ago
  AFAIU That's what a number of the people were doing on the Ontario program. That and looking to start a business. They were promised 3 years and planned around that before the program was suddenly pulled out from under their feet after they'd already made major life changes.
1kGarand 7y ago
As long as you and others _choose_ to define value of a person only for their economic value (work output), we will always have poverty, no matter how enormous our total economic output (humans+machines) will become.
nicholassmith 7y ago
As someone that grew up in an area where there are many families that have at least two generations of non-working family units I'm actually thrilled by UBI. It won't encourage that any more than the current social welfare system does, even if those numbers increase slightly the rest of the benefits to the rest of the population are still worth it. Not doing things because some of the population take the piss is not sensible.
- Matticus_Rex 7y ago
  > It won't encourage that any more than the current social welfare system does Citation needed
  - nicholassmith 7y ago
    Smack a large "in my opinion" on there. I don't think anyone has done the statistical modelling for it yet.
jbeales 7y ago
> This is very misleading reporting. ... Slightly less than one-fifth were employed before but unemployed during the pilot (17%) From the article: > The report shows nearly three-quarters of respondents who were working when the pilot project began kept at it despite receiving basic income. While they didn't say "83% of people kept working" saying "nearly three quarters" is much easier to read. The article under-reports the number of people who kept working, if anything. Edit: formatting.
zelon88 7y ago
No, It dis-incentivizes killing your emotional and physical well-being for a dead-end position at a slave-driven agency that's forcing all their workers into race to the bottom. Which in turn incentivizes trickle down to attract those workers back into jobs again with worthwhile pay and adequate benefits to survive or gasp maybe even raise a family!
ConfusionMatrix 7y ago
When my kids were younger my wife and I had to work to pay the bills, but the majority of her income went to child care. After a year or so I got a raise and she could be a stay at home mom and our kids just jumped ahead mentally with mom their to interact with them all day. If UBI could enable a parent to stay home full time that would be a very good use of funds.
ngokevin 7y ago
What is work? With a large portion of labor subject to automation in and economy that doesn't need much of work anymore, people can rediscover their own form of work that brings value to the us as humans: caregiving, volunteering, arts, creativity, music, journalism, teaching, and revitalize local communities where all our main street stores are shuttering and local newspapers die in the thousands.
richardlblair 7y ago
Your right in that the reporting needs a lot of help in this article. It does a terrible job of painting a picture of how the province's welfare works today. Welfare in Ontario strongly disincentives work. Basic income may not be enough, but the current system is fundamentally broken. It punishes people who do what they can, by cutting them off from the system. So, by working, in many cases people will earn less. I also would like a break down of the savings the province had on healthcare. There is a lot of potential in Ontario and we need to help people get there. Health, wellness, education, and supporting those in a bad spot financially are all ways to do that. Anecdotally, I live just outside of Hamilton, one of the places the trial was run. That city needs help desperately. For Canada's standard, it's in a very very rough place. It needs every bit of help it can get.
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> All studies so far show a pretty consistent ~10% work disincentive. This is what all the detractors say when they say it disincentivizes work. Most of these studies aren't done independent of existing means-tested government benefits. Then the UBI amount in itself is typically not enough to disqualify from eligibility for means-tested benefits, but a UBI plus a job would phase out nearly everything. So you have on the one hand more subsidy living on the UBI plus existing government benefits than you would if the UBI would replace existing government benefits, and on the other hand still all the same disincentive to work of the existing system because taking a job results in the loss of government benefits, which results in a very high de facto tax rate and corresponding disincentive to work.
multiplegeorges 7y ago
And this is a very misleading summary of the results. Here are some actual quote from the study: > Ten respondents moved from unemployment to employment while 32 moved from employment to unemployment. Of the participants who moved from employment to unemployment, 13 (40.6%) enrolled in full-time education during the pilot with the intention of re-entering the labour market later as more qualified workers. Almost half of people who stopped working did it in order to train for a better job. That's great! > most of the respondents who were unemployed during the pilot reported experiencing health issues that made it difficult or impossible for them to work. Receiving BI allowed sick people to not be forced into work to pay for a basic existence? That's great! Take into account those two factors and almost no able bodied, employable person opted to not work. Sounds like a success to me.
- jpttsn 7y ago
  Sounds like the participants knew the study was temporary and invested the money in a job they knew they’d need after the study.
  - zazaalaza 7y ago
    Exactly. With a permanent UBI in place you can throw all these studies out the window.
    - battery_cowboy 7y ago
      [citation needed] Is that anything but conjecture? I see a study showing that UBI is a "good thing", and you didn't provide a source for your reasoning. Edit: to all those saying that the parent comment is straightforward, or common sense, or whatever, it's not straightforward or common sense because I disagree that UBI would be a failure. No one knows what would happen under UBI, but these types of studies give some evidence as to what is going to happen. Everyone saying the parent is correct is basically similar to saying we should stop studying fusion because it's common sense we'll never achieve it (there are people who say that, too). It's a good first step to study this, at least, and goes to show we need to test UBI on a greater scale.
deleted 7y ago
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neves 7y ago
You must also consider the amount of shitty jobs going away. I'd refuse a work that had terrible conditions, since I wouldn't die of hunger anymore. The other working people would also have better job condition, so they would be freer to quit their job. Everybody improves, but the business that exists just based in brutal exploitation of their workers.
mordymoop 7y ago
Would be good if they could somehow disentangle work from valuable work. Many (maybe most) hold down “bullshit jobs” that create no value and serve mainly as a kind of de facto socially subsidized welfare. The aim of UBI ought to be the elimination of worthless jobs.
virmundi 7y ago
Why not require those who go on UBI and not work to give up the ability to reproduce while doing so? It’s not a perfect system but it would reduce the amount of population stuck in the entrenchment.
aylmao 7y ago
There could be other factors involved too, like the short-termness of the study. One year isn't a lot of time, and it's definitely enough to coast on savings and take a break from a job you hated until you get bored and/or need to take on another one. Also, more so than UBI (or perhaps as a compliment to one another), IMO reforms to labour policy are due. The 40 hour work-week has been standard for a long time, but if we have the productivity surplus to even consider UBI, why not consider a 4-day workweek, for example?
TrinaryWorksToo 7y ago
Why would you ever want someone to work? Isn't the ideal that we automate everything, work never, and everyone can get enough?
Ar-Curunir 7y ago
This “necessity of work” is an evil that we must get rid of. So many jobs are absolutely useless and degrading from a societal and human perspective. If basic income enables one to stop doing these jobs, humanity as a whole is better for it.
brightball 7y ago
That’s what I always come back to with UBI. It needs to be survival level but not desirable long term, so that the goal is for it to supplement a job and not to replace it.
zazaalaza 7y ago
Your opinion is spot on. Also the studies are short term whereas real UBI would be permanent.
danans 7y ago
UBI is a tool for dealing with rising inequality and economic insecurity, not a solution on its own. People will be incentivized to work despite UBI because they still want better things, and will work to pay for things that provide social signalling value. A UBI shouldn't be designed to try to cover all desires and eliminate all reason to work, but rather should be tailored to give people more flexibility in choosing jobs and locations. Even Andrew Yang's $1k/mo/adult proposal will not allow anyone to live very well in even the low COL areas of the US. But it might help them not to lose their roof or car while unemployed. This is analogous to how universal healthcare will never cover cosmetic procedures, but that's ok because it will cover your healthcare even if you end up unemployed.
- airstrike 7y ago
  > UBI is a tool for dealing with rising inequality Just want to point out that inequality globally isn't necessarily rising. See e.g. the evolution of the distribution in wealth per wealth group per region based on data from table 3.2 of Credit Suisse's 2014 and 2019 Global Wealth Databooks. Compare "Percentage of region (in %)" from 2014 (screenshot): https://i.stack.imgur.com/IEEse.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/IEEse.png 2019 (screenshot): https://i.stack.imgur.com/h92qp.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/h92qp.png -------- Link to full PDFs are here: https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/about-us/research/publications/global-wealth-databook-2014.pdf https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab... https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/about-us/research/publications/global-wealth-databook-2019.pdf https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab... (I picked 2014 and 2019 because those were the oldest / newest PDFs I could find by changing the year in the URL...)
  - danans 7y ago
    > Just want to point out that inequality globally isn't necessarily rising. My comment specifically referred to UBI in the context of the US, so I'm not sure what the relevance of global inequality is to whether or not an individual country does UBI. If anything, the globalization that is driving global inequality down (a good thing), when coupled with domestic policies in the developed world that massively favor owners of financial capital, are driving domestic inequality up, which further bolsters the argument for UBI-like measures.
sailfast 7y ago
Why is a reduction in labor supply bad at present for low / unskilled labor? We're moving in that direction anyway using automation and software anyway, correct? Also I see no mention at all of frictional unemployment as part of Mr. Stucchio's conclusions and if I suddenly had the ability to look for new jobs I would certainly take advantage. The 10% number is created because people would now have actual OPTIONS, which is exactly what you want to create with this program. It's one of the goals. I don't see the disincentive being an issue except that it might increase wages in a tight economy which, is an actual thing people also want to do with these kinds of programs. As for the personal opinion: obviously you're entitled to it, however I'd recommend a deeper look. Are you drawing this conclusion from personal experience? Do you know people whose parents never worked and are you really saying they're at a disadvantage because their family never worked, or is the real cause of the disadvantage of the "entrenchments of poverty" the lack of money? The issue seems to be less "look at this poor role model - they never worked, so neither will their kids" but rather "we didn't have any money to actually consider a life that would allow me to focus on the things that make one successful, but rather food was difficult, and we were one broken arm away from bankruptcy". There seems to be a bias in your opinion. Please go speak with or listen to some actual human stories. I don't know anyone who would be less likely to be successful as a result of UBI. (Nor am I sold that it's a magic bullet either - it would be very costly)
- WalterBright 7y ago
  > I don't know anyone who would be less likely to be successful as a result of UBI. I have an acquaintance who works at min wage jobs just long enough to qualify for unemployment, then he manages to get laid off. He lives off the unemployment until it runs out, then gets another min wage job, and the cycle repeats as long as I've known him. He's quite content with this arrangement.
  - entropicdrifter 7y ago
    Wouldn't he be more successful with UBI, then? He would likely overall save the corporations he's being employed on and off by money by reducing their turnover. Also, it's likely most low wage jobs would have their wages increase because there would be less fear of unionizing if striking meant that nobody would be going hungry. Thus, UBI can reduce the degree of low wage exploitation at both the worker's side (getting laid off asap for unemployment) and the business's side (exploitative policies countered by stronger unions and more incentive to unionize) while at the same time providing a fixed rate cost and less bureaucracy needed compared to the current welfare systems Just saying, seems like a win-win to me.
logfromblammo 7y ago
I doubt that the 17% who quit were working in jobs that they liked. If a employer's job requires a "work or die" sword of Damocles dangling over laborers' heads to be filled, perhaps it shouldn't exist. The New Testament Bible aphorism from 2 Thessalonians 3:10, "He who does not work, neither shall he eat," has been used by many to incentivize work, including John Smith of Jamestown colony and V.I. Lenin of the Soviet Union. It is an aphorism borne by a world of scarcity, where all available labor is not only required, but must also be allocated wisely. It isn't just "work or die", but "if you won't help, we all might die." In a world of excess, wherein machines supply most of the labor required to produce the necessities, that becomes counterproductive. If everyone must work to eat, but no person can work as efficiently as a machine, and there isn't enough discretionary work to go around, then that game of economic musical chairs ends when someone starves because someone didn't want their hedges trimmed into topiary, or they didn't want to upgrade to the fused basalt railings on their luxury yacht. If the machine-owners can't spend the profits from their machines fast enough, people cannot afford to buy what the machines produce.
m463 7y ago
I think the work disincentive is the big deal. I lived in a city near an native-american reservation. There were groups of able-bodied men that would just cash their checks and buy alcohol. I can imagine the same thing with folks with reversible drug problems, or in areas with declining employment. A stipend would basically prevent a "reckoning" and allow able people to avoid personal responsibility or necessary changes indefinitely. And that's what people do. They keep on plugging on in a bad situation avoiding necessary changes. Maybe I'm wrong. I've never been in such low situations, so I don't think I can have an opinion based on personal experience.
bsder 7y ago
> then the work disincentive could be a disaster We need to get past "Your worth is your work". People don't deserve to be neglected simply because they produce nothing that society currently values. We all reach that point with age. And multi-generational problems are generally solved with your educational system.
empath75 7y ago
Why does everyone assume that people working is a good in and of itself? Why does nobody complain about the deleterious effects of inherited wealth on the children of billionaires?
BrainInAJar 7y ago
> it disincentivizes work "work" is a funny term. Accepting for the sake of argument that it disincentivizes economically beneficial work, what if it frees up eg, artists and other culturally important activities? Or family care? Is that a bad thing? It makes /society/ better, even if it makes /the economy/ slightly worse
nojvek 7y ago
What’s SSI and SSDI ?
- mkl 7y ago
  American social support payments: SSI = "Supplemental Security Income", SSDI = "Social Security Disability Insurance".
jdkee 7y ago
The effect on children who see their parents get up and go to work regularly is immense. Similarly, the effect on children whose parents encourage them to complete their education or go on to higher education is huge. Breaking the cycles of poverty rely upon these factors.

daemonk 7y ago

What are the demographics of those that dropped out of the work force? Didn't some UBI studies observe that while there are people that dropped out of the workforce, these people consisted of mothers that can now go back to child rearing or younger people that can now pursue an education?

simonsarris 7y ago
It is extremely unfortunate but studies like this are almost always done by people with somewhat close-ended goals. This research in this one is mostly self reports, and then, mostly "did free money make you feel better?" They are not recording, or interested in recording, the nature of who dropped out of the workforce and why, even though that seems like far more important, and somewhat more empirical, information.
- 52-6F-62 7y ago
  In your criticism you are missing some crucial details surrounding this report. This is essentially scrounging to make the most out of what was a single, but fully budgeted, study on BI with the intention of running more studies. The study was cancelled by the incoming government out of spite. All people who set up plans, knowing the full length of the study beforehand were suddenly tossed out of the program and it was just down, including any study occurring. They're trying to gather what and any information they can from the program that wasn't even given the chance to run to completion. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/basic-income-pilot-project-ford-cancel-1.4771343 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/basic-income-pilot-project-fo...
deleted 7y ago
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jbeales 7y ago
Not really demographics, but from the article: > while some people did stop working, about half of them headed back to school in hopes of coming back to a better job.
76543210 7y ago
Child rearing seems like a waste of talent. Our high cost of education should be teaching people to create more value than the 15k/yr of value it is raising a child before the age of 5.(daycare costs, 4 children per 1 adult) As an ancedote, it seems part time mothers are significantly happier than stay at home moms.
- rocmcd 7y ago
  Trying to distill 'child rearing' to $15k/year and calling it a 'waste of talent' is absurd. Not everything can (and should) be broken down into a monetary amount and optimized for. You can classify anything as a 'waste of talent' when looking through this lens. Are you a software engineer? If so, then doing literally anything apart from developing software is a 'waste of talent'. Cleaning dishes? Gardening? Exercising?
  - 76543210 7y ago
    Yes, having a software engineer cleaning dishes for a restaurant is a waste of talent. Maybe if overtime was flexible, you could suggest hiring unskilled workers to do those tasks at home. I love my kid, but it's not like he's learning cutting edge stuff that requires an engineer to teach them. And there's many hours in the evenings and weekends we spend together where he learns how his dad behaves.
    - refurb 7y ago
      A huge part of growing up is developing bonds, understanding relationships and getting your kid on a firm footing so they can deal with what the world throws at them. A lot of that develop happens when they are not learning, or at least you don’t think they are.
      - 76543210 7y ago
        I've been working full time and my kid gets excited to see me every day. The bond is there. If you really want to turn this around, imagine how dependent a child would be on a parent if they never used a babysitter.

lidHanteyk 7y ago

As long as our government doesn't have a public service with an unlimited supply of entry-level jobs, it is disingenuous to talk about poverty as only endable by work. Poverty can be ended by money as well, and given that poverty is defined by (lack of) money, it doesn't seem right to focus on work.

stevenwoo 7y ago

Your link leaves out the study of the Alaska Permanent Fund https://www.nber.org/papers/w24312 https://www.nber.org/papers/w24312 I believe it's left out because it contradicts the premise - it found more people actually looked for work because prior to the Alaska payment they were too poor to venture far from home.

jonathankoren 7y ago
Similar findings are repeated all across the social safety net. For example, the Scandinavian countries with their robust social programs routinely top lists for ease of entrepreneurship. [0] (e.g. Losing health insurance is big disincentive to starting a new company.) There are also have been repeated studies that found that financial stress causes people to perform worse on cognitive tasks, and removing that stressor increases performance.[1][2] [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/eshachhabra/2016/07/24/why-the-nordics-are-the-best-place-to-run-a-business-and-live/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/eshachhabra/2016/07/24/why-the-... [1] https://www.citylab.com/life/2013/08/how-poverty-taxes-brain/6716/ https://www.citylab.com/life/2013/08/how-poverty-taxes-brain... [2] https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2018/preliminary/paper/yaYn2DYb https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2018/preliminary/paper/yaY...
- refurb 7y ago
  Ease of entrepreneurship might be high, but actual entrepreneurship lags the US where a much weaker social safety net exists. Ow do you explain that?
  - jonathankoren 7y ago
    You’re connecting two irrelevant things. Look at Sweden. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/09/sweden-startups/541413/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/09/sweden-...
  - crooked-v 7y ago
    Sweden has 10 million people. The U.S. has 300 million.

patentatt 7y ago

I think it would be hugely advantageous to my children if they had two parents who could dedicate themselves full time to raising them. In what world is having a parent stressed out and absent most of the time good for kids?

crystaln 7y ago

Part of the reason for ubi is that a lot of work is exploitative or underpaid. Ubi puts people in a negotiating position to not work and demand higher payment, or to not work and contribute to society in other ways.

Kalium 7y ago
Might it be worth considering that choosing to not work and choosing to contribute to society in other ways could, for some people and in some circumstances, be slightly different decisions?
- a0zU 7y ago
  There are absolutely people who would contribute to society in other ways but there are also people who would not work, not contribute and, sit in their rooms all day not having the will to do anything but debate with strangers on internet forums(lol). In my opinion the problem with UBI is that it would take away the necessity for people to do something to survive and it would make a significant minority of the population miserable because they wouldn't have to do anything but consume.
  - loa_in_ 7y ago
    There is a lot of things to do other than consume. Even if it's learning to write poetry
    - a0zU 7y ago
      Absolutely, there are plenty of things to do other than consume and there are definetly people who would discover that they had a talent at writing poetry, but doing those things require effort that a significant minority would not be ready or willing to make, and consummation is incredibly appealing to those who aren't strong enough to put effort into anything else.
  - Shacklz 7y ago
    > In my opinion the problem with UBI is that it would take away the necessity for people to do something to survive and it would make a significant minority of the population miserable With all due respect, but this opinion reeks of someone who actually has the ability to choose his own job, say no to exploitative employment-practices, all while actually getting payed decently. Someone who has to work a shit job they hate for a salary that barely pays the bills because they simply have no other option might as well be miserable because of this situation. This endless slog they cannot escape, a treadmill they despise but have no other choice than to keep going. And let's not kid ourselves - there are _a lot_ of people out there who are doing jobs they don't want to do, or at least wouldn't want to do for the kind of salary they receive.

shkkmo 7y ago

That is a pretty misleading assessment of the study: > Overall, there was a slight reduction in the number employed during the pilot compared to the number employed prior to the pilot. Ten respondents moved from unemployment to employment while 32 moved from employment to unemployment. Of the participants who moved from employment to unemployment, 13 (40.6%) enrolled in full-time education during the pilot with the intention of re-entering the labour market later as more qualified workers. The work disincentive seems well below 10%. > If you consider multi-generational entrenchments of poverty as its own problem, worth serious merit, then the work disincentive could be a disaster. The meta study you linked to shows a marked difference in the effect across genders. It seems pretty likely that a reduction in the labor force would caused by a significant factor by families where both parents work, and one has the ability to stay home with the kids. I don't see any data here talking about an increase in household where neither parent works. I suspect that any decrease that does exist, applies to single-parent households. When you take this into account alongside the number of these the "work disincentived" that are people moving into full-time education programs, it doesn't seem obvious at all that here will be a negative effect on multi-generational poverty. Finally, that article seems to lack a basic understanding of economics. A reduction in employment due to reductions in the job supply (such as during a recession) is in no way equivalent to a reduction in employment due to reductions in the labor supply. When you reduce the job supply, you reduce consumer income due to job loss / wage reductions, this compounds to further lower economic activity and thus leads to more reduction in the job supply. When you reduce labor supply through UBI, you don't see the same drop in consumer income, and wages should actually go up.

awakeasleep 7y ago

The end of slavery was also a huge disincentive to work

hirundo 7y ago
Is starvation really less of an incentive to work than being beaten?

jonnycomputer 7y ago

Sounds like UBI gave them the negotiating power to decline jobs that did not meet their needs, were too exploitive, were not in alignment with their goals, and so on. That's part of the point: to increase labor power.

danenania 7y ago

"If you consider multi-generational entrenchments of poverty as its own problem, worth serious merit, then the work disincentive could be a disaster." Multi-generational entrenchments of poverty are already a disaster, and not because of fuzzy ideas like "instilling a work ethic", but because many millions of people lack the basic material resources needed to fulfill anything close to their potential. A kid watching their parents break their backs as minimum-wage slaves living paycheck to paycheck doesn't prepare them to do anything other than the same thing with their lives.

Aunche 7y ago
> millions of people lack the basic material resources needed to fulfill anything close to their potential There is a limited amount of capital in the world. Distributing it now might help those at home, but it does not help the billion people who still lack electricity. There simply is not enough capital in the world to build trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure for free. Investment is a much better vehicle for distribution than UBI as it also creates wealth.
- danenania 7y ago
  "There is a limited amount of capital in the world." You've already lost me. This is provably false, as any programmer should know: if you sit down and code something useful today, you've just increased the amount of capital in the world. Out of thin air. A carpenter who buys a bunch of lumber and turns it into a thousand-dollar piece of furniture does the same. The more people can learn to add value to the world, and the more value they can add, the bigger the total pie of wealth can grow. Investment distributes wealth primarily from the elite to the slightly-less elite. It doesn't break the cycle of poverty and immediate survival focus that prevents millions and millions of potential Einsteins or Feynmans or Musks from doing anything with their lives other than scraping by.
  - Aunche 7y ago
    I mean that there isn't enough capital to distribute to everyone in the world, not that it's fixed forever. You can grow it. That's my point. It's better to increase capital than redistribute it. > Investment distributes wealth primarily from the elite to the slightly-less elite. If you've seen how China changed in the last couple decades, you'd see how this obviously isn't true. Basically all electronics are manufactured in a developing Asian country by the children of subsidence farmers.

mfer 7y ago

I know and know of many people who don't want to work or contribute to society. Sitting at home and not contributing to society is kind of a goal. Some groups are negative to those who try to work or contribute. I know families who have passed that on from parents to children. This isn't everyone but it is a segment. I don't see much talk about this. The folks in this segment aren't bound to be on HN. I point this out just as a piece of information. There are opportunities in that. Maybe not to make a bunch of money but to understand people and maybe help some.

vharuck 7y ago
I don't think an economic system should be used as a blunt weapon to punish perceived immorality.
- mfer 7y ago
  I added my comment as a data point. One that I find is often overlooked or not talked about. How that data point is considered is something else. As for how an economic system considers perceives immorality is a long winded conversation. Which economic system? What are rewards vs weapons in that economic system? For example, an economic system could reward work with money and not make money a given. Part of the idea is to look at rewards and how they work in a culture as well.
pault 7y ago
Would the world be worse off if people who have no interest in working and will siphon off as much money as they can from their employer until they get fired left the workforce? Those jobs would be freed up for people that actually want them.

zelon88 7y ago

Also can you understand why I'm not shocked that an American-born statistician choosing to live in a third world country has evidence to support UBI being a bad idea?

koonsolo 7y ago

One other thing to add to it: The community in the experiment were not self sustained. What I mean is that extra money was pumped into this experiment. In real life the money needs to come from that same community, which boils down to increased taxes on labor. I would love to see the statistics on work incentive when your taxes double on that same work.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago

The fallacy in that argument is that you're equating "dropping out of the labour market" with doing absolutely nothing of any value. For life. The other side of the fallacy is that any occupation based on investment or speculation is essentially parasitic, unless it includes a rare commitment to stick with an enterprise until it's a net benefit to all stakeholders. (Not just shareholders and the board.) The latter occupations are "in the labour market" but still making a net negative contribution. Essentially you're attempting to frame this as if UBI encourages freeloading. In fact the most influential freeloading is mostly at the other end - and the fact that it's considered a heroic and noble kind of sanctioned freeloading doesn't change its basic nature. So unless you're sure that everyone who is temporarily out of the labour market does nothing of value to anyone, ever, and also that their negative influence is worse than that of speculators and rent-seekers, it's hard to be convinced that this is a serious problem. The other issue - social capital - is a complete different problem. People who are in work don't necessarily have access to social capital either. But as a rule it's easier to start a business with a safety net than without one. UBI could always be associated with opportunities for extended education. Money alone is rarely the issue, and there aren't many downsides to extended adult ed.

larrywright 7y ago

Do these studies account for people who drop out of the workforce to pursue education or training? It seems like that would be one of the benefits: allowing someone who is under skilled and working a low skill job to quit and focus on acquiring the skills they need to get a higher paying job.

52-6F-62 7y ago
AFAIU That's what a number of the people were doing on the Ontario program. That and looking to start a business. They were promised 3 years and planned around that before the program was suddenly pulled out from under their feet after they'd already made major life changes.

1kGarand 7y ago

As long as you and others _choose_ to define value of a person only for their economic value (work output), we will always have poverty, no matter how enormous our total economic output (humans+machines) will become.

nicholassmith 7y ago

As someone that grew up in an area where there are many families that have at least two generations of non-working family units I'm actually thrilled by UBI. It won't encourage that any more than the current social welfare system does, even if those numbers increase slightly the rest of the benefits to the rest of the population are still worth it. Not doing things because some of the population take the piss is not sensible.

Matticus_Rex 7y ago
> It won't encourage that any more than the current social welfare system does Citation needed
- nicholassmith 7y ago
  Smack a large "in my opinion" on there. I don't think anyone has done the statistical modelling for it yet.

jbeales 7y ago

> This is very misleading reporting. ... Slightly less than one-fifth were employed before but unemployed during the pilot (17%) From the article: > The report shows nearly three-quarters of respondents who were working when the pilot project began kept at it despite receiving basic income. While they didn't say "83% of people kept working" saying "nearly three quarters" is much easier to read. The article under-reports the number of people who kept working, if anything. Edit: formatting.

zelon88 7y ago

No, It dis-incentivizes killing your emotional and physical well-being for a dead-end position at a slave-driven agency that's forcing all their workers into race to the bottom. Which in turn incentivizes trickle down to attract those workers back into jobs again with worthwhile pay and adequate benefits to survive or gasp maybe even raise a family!

ConfusionMatrix 7y ago

When my kids were younger my wife and I had to work to pay the bills, but the majority of her income went to child care. After a year or so I got a raise and she could be a stay at home mom and our kids just jumped ahead mentally with mom their to interact with them all day. If UBI could enable a parent to stay home full time that would be a very good use of funds.

ngokevin 7y ago

What is work? With a large portion of labor subject to automation in and economy that doesn't need much of work anymore, people can rediscover their own form of work that brings value to the us as humans: caregiving, volunteering, arts, creativity, music, journalism, teaching, and revitalize local communities where all our main street stores are shuttering and local newspapers die in the thousands.

richardlblair 7y ago

Your right in that the reporting needs a lot of help in this article. It does a terrible job of painting a picture of how the province's welfare works today. Welfare in Ontario strongly disincentives work. Basic income may not be enough, but the current system is fundamentally broken. It punishes people who do what they can, by cutting them off from the system. So, by working, in many cases people will earn less. I also would like a break down of the savings the province had on healthcare. There is a lot of potential in Ontario and we need to help people get there. Health, wellness, education, and supporting those in a bad spot financially are all ways to do that. Anecdotally, I live just outside of Hamilton, one of the places the trial was run. That city needs help desperately. For Canada's standard, it's in a very very rough place. It needs every bit of help it can get.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

> All studies so far show a pretty consistent ~10% work disincentive. This is what all the detractors say when they say it disincentivizes work. Most of these studies aren't done independent of existing means-tested government benefits. Then the UBI amount in itself is typically not enough to disqualify from eligibility for means-tested benefits, but a UBI plus a job would phase out nearly everything. So you have on the one hand more subsidy living on the UBI plus existing government benefits than you would if the UBI would replace existing government benefits, and on the other hand still all the same disincentive to work of the existing system because taking a job results in the loss of government benefits, which results in a very high de facto tax rate and corresponding disincentive to work.

multiplegeorges 7y ago

And this is a very misleading summary of the results. Here are some actual quote from the study: > Ten respondents moved from unemployment to employment while 32 moved from employment to unemployment. Of the participants who moved from employment to unemployment, 13 (40.6%) enrolled in full-time education during the pilot with the intention of re-entering the labour market later as more qualified workers. Almost half of people who stopped working did it in order to train for a better job. That's great! > most of the respondents who were unemployed during the pilot reported experiencing health issues that made it difficult or impossible for them to work. Receiving BI allowed sick people to not be forced into work to pay for a basic existence? That's great! Take into account those two factors and almost no able bodied, employable person opted to not work. Sounds like a success to me.

jpttsn 7y ago
Sounds like the participants knew the study was temporary and invested the money in a job they knew they’d need after the study.
- zazaalaza 7y ago
  Exactly. With a permanent UBI in place you can throw all these studies out the window.
  - battery_cowboy 7y ago
    [citation needed] Is that anything but conjecture? I see a study showing that UBI is a "good thing", and you didn't provide a source for your reasoning. Edit: to all those saying that the parent comment is straightforward, or common sense, or whatever, it's not straightforward or common sense because I disagree that UBI would be a failure. No one knows what would happen under UBI, but these types of studies give some evidence as to what is going to happen. Everyone saying the parent is correct is basically similar to saying we should stop studying fusion because it's common sense we'll never achieve it (there are people who say that, too). It's a good first step to study this, at least, and goes to show we need to test UBI on a greater scale.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

neves 7y ago

You must also consider the amount of shitty jobs going away. I'd refuse a work that had terrible conditions, since I wouldn't die of hunger anymore. The other working people would also have better job condition, so they would be freer to quit their job. Everybody improves, but the business that exists just based in brutal exploitation of their workers.

mordymoop 7y ago

Would be good if they could somehow disentangle work from valuable work. Many (maybe most) hold down “bullshit jobs” that create no value and serve mainly as a kind of de facto socially subsidized welfare. The aim of UBI ought to be the elimination of worthless jobs.

virmundi 7y ago

Why not require those who go on UBI and not work to give up the ability to reproduce while doing so? It’s not a perfect system but it would reduce the amount of population stuck in the entrenchment.

aylmao 7y ago

There could be other factors involved too, like the short-termness of the study. One year isn't a lot of time, and it's definitely enough to coast on savings and take a break from a job you hated until you get bored and/or need to take on another one. Also, more so than UBI (or perhaps as a compliment to one another), IMO reforms to labour policy are due. The 40 hour work-week has been standard for a long time, but if we have the productivity surplus to even consider UBI, why not consider a 4-day workweek, for example?

TrinaryWorksToo 7y ago

Why would you ever want someone to work? Isn't the ideal that we automate everything, work never, and everyone can get enough?

Ar-Curunir 7y ago

This “necessity of work” is an evil that we must get rid of. So many jobs are absolutely useless and degrading from a societal and human perspective. If basic income enables one to stop doing these jobs, humanity as a whole is better for it.

brightball 7y ago

That’s what I always come back to with UBI. It needs to be survival level but not desirable long term, so that the goal is for it to supplement a job and not to replace it.

zazaalaza 7y ago

Your opinion is spot on. Also the studies are short term whereas real UBI would be permanent.

danans 7y ago

UBI is a tool for dealing with rising inequality and economic insecurity, not a solution on its own. People will be incentivized to work despite UBI because they still want better things, and will work to pay for things that provide social signalling value. A UBI shouldn't be designed to try to cover all desires and eliminate all reason to work, but rather should be tailored to give people more flexibility in choosing jobs and locations. Even Andrew Yang's $1k/mo/adult proposal will not allow anyone to live very well in even the low COL areas of the US. But it might help them not to lose their roof or car while unemployed. This is analogous to how universal healthcare will never cover cosmetic procedures, but that's ok because it will cover your healthcare even if you end up unemployed.

airstrike 7y ago
> UBI is a tool for dealing with rising inequality Just want to point out that inequality globally isn't necessarily rising. See e.g. the evolution of the distribution in wealth per wealth group per region based on data from table 3.2 of Credit Suisse's 2014 and 2019 Global Wealth Databooks. Compare "Percentage of region (in %)" from 2014 (screenshot): https://i.stack.imgur.com/IEEse.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/IEEse.png 2019 (screenshot): https://i.stack.imgur.com/h92qp.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/h92qp.png -------- Link to full PDFs are here: https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/about-us/research/publications/global-wealth-databook-2014.pdf https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab... https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/about-us/research/publications/global-wealth-databook-2019.pdf https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab... (I picked 2014 and 2019 because those were the oldest / newest PDFs I could find by changing the year in the URL...)
- danans 7y ago
  > Just want to point out that inequality globally isn't necessarily rising. My comment specifically referred to UBI in the context of the US, so I'm not sure what the relevance of global inequality is to whether or not an individual country does UBI. If anything, the globalization that is driving global inequality down (a good thing), when coupled with domestic policies in the developed world that massively favor owners of financial capital, are driving domestic inequality up, which further bolsters the argument for UBI-like measures.

sailfast 7y ago

Why is a reduction in labor supply bad at present for low / unskilled labor? We're moving in that direction anyway using automation and software anyway, correct? Also I see no mention at all of frictional unemployment as part of Mr. Stucchio's conclusions and if I suddenly had the ability to look for new jobs I would certainly take advantage. The 10% number is created because people would now have actual OPTIONS, which is exactly what you want to create with this program. It's one of the goals. I don't see the disincentive being an issue except that it might increase wages in a tight economy which, is an actual thing people also want to do with these kinds of programs. As for the personal opinion: obviously you're entitled to it, however I'd recommend a deeper look. Are you drawing this conclusion from personal experience? Do you know people whose parents never worked and are you really saying they're at a disadvantage because their family never worked, or is the real cause of the disadvantage of the "entrenchments of poverty" the lack of money? The issue seems to be less "look at this poor role model - they never worked, so neither will their kids" but rather "we didn't have any money to actually consider a life that would allow me to focus on the things that make one successful, but rather food was difficult, and we were one broken arm away from bankruptcy". There seems to be a bias in your opinion. Please go speak with or listen to some actual human stories. I don't know anyone who would be less likely to be successful as a result of UBI. (Nor am I sold that it's a magic bullet either - it would be very costly)

WalterBright 7y ago
> I don't know anyone who would be less likely to be successful as a result of UBI. I have an acquaintance who works at min wage jobs just long enough to qualify for unemployment, then he manages to get laid off. He lives off the unemployment until it runs out, then gets another min wage job, and the cycle repeats as long as I've known him. He's quite content with this arrangement.
- entropicdrifter 7y ago
  Wouldn't he be more successful with UBI, then? He would likely overall save the corporations he's being employed on and off by money by reducing their turnover. Also, it's likely most low wage jobs would have their wages increase because there would be less fear of unionizing if striking meant that nobody would be going hungry. Thus, UBI can reduce the degree of low wage exploitation at both the worker's side (getting laid off asap for unemployment) and the business's side (exploitative policies countered by stronger unions and more incentive to unionize) while at the same time providing a fixed rate cost and less bureaucracy needed compared to the current welfare systems Just saying, seems like a win-win to me.

logfromblammo 7y ago

I doubt that the 17% who quit were working in jobs that they liked. If a employer's job requires a "work or die" sword of Damocles dangling over laborers' heads to be filled, perhaps it shouldn't exist. The New Testament Bible aphorism from 2 Thessalonians 3:10, "He who does not work, neither shall he eat," has been used by many to incentivize work, including John Smith of Jamestown colony and V.I. Lenin of the Soviet Union. It is an aphorism borne by a world of scarcity, where all available labor is not only required, but must also be allocated wisely. It isn't just "work or die", but "if you won't help, we all might die." In a world of excess, wherein machines supply most of the labor required to produce the necessities, that becomes counterproductive. If everyone must work to eat, but no person can work as efficiently as a machine, and there isn't enough discretionary work to go around, then that game of economic musical chairs ends when someone starves because someone didn't want their hedges trimmed into topiary, or they didn't want to upgrade to the fused basalt railings on their luxury yacht. If the machine-owners can't spend the profits from their machines fast enough, people cannot afford to buy what the machines produce.

m463 7y ago

I think the work disincentive is the big deal. I lived in a city near an native-american reservation. There were groups of able-bodied men that would just cash their checks and buy alcohol. I can imagine the same thing with folks with reversible drug problems, or in areas with declining employment. A stipend would basically prevent a "reckoning" and allow able people to avoid personal responsibility or necessary changes indefinitely. And that's what people do. They keep on plugging on in a bad situation avoiding necessary changes. Maybe I'm wrong. I've never been in such low situations, so I don't think I can have an opinion based on personal experience.

bsder 7y ago

> then the work disincentive could be a disaster We need to get past "Your worth is your work". People don't deserve to be neglected simply because they produce nothing that society currently values. We all reach that point with age. And multi-generational problems are generally solved with your educational system.

empath75 7y ago

Why does everyone assume that people working is a good in and of itself? Why does nobody complain about the deleterious effects of inherited wealth on the children of billionaires?

BrainInAJar 7y ago

> it disincentivizes work "work" is a funny term. Accepting for the sake of argument that it disincentivizes economically beneficial work, what if it frees up eg, artists and other culturally important activities? Or family care? Is that a bad thing? It makes /society/ better, even if it makes /the economy/ slightly worse

nojvek 7y ago

What’s SSI and SSDI ?

mkl 7y ago
American social support payments: SSI = "Supplemental Security Income", SSDI = "Social Security Disability Insurance".

jdkee 7y ago

The effect on children who see their parents get up and go to work regularly is immense. Similarly, the effect on children whose parents encourage them to complete their education or go on to higher education is huge. Breaking the cycles of poverty rely upon these factors.