11 ms·

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

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.
    - Revery 7y ago
      I think his statement that these UBI experiments yield little insight into how actual UBI could play out full-scale holds water without a source.
    - zepto 7y ago
      It’s a logical challenge to the ecological validity of the study. No citation is needed for straightforward observations.
    - zazaalaza 7y ago
      What I am saying is that a temporary UBI experiment cannot simulate the changes that a permanent UBI would bring. Especially when everyone is aware that this is temporary.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - rtkwe 7y ago
      The main thing being said is there's a drastic difference between knowing the BI you're getting is temporary and it being a 'permanent' government program. There's no way to provide a citation for that because the only way to run that is to have a full UBI and study the results to see if these short term BI studies still hold water. However it's not a stretch at all to say people will act different when they're temporarily receiving money than when they'll receive it 'forever'.
      - blackflame7000 7y ago
        In fact it's well known that disposable vs fixed income directly impacts the financial decisions people make
        rtkwe 7y ago
        The main argument I, and I believe the OP, was making is because the period of these programs are limited, and not even the full period is guaranteed as this shows, it affects how people act. If it's a program I believe I can count on existing for 10-20 years I can make significant life changes around receiving the money, eg move somewhere super cheap and volunteer or something, but at just a few I know I'm going to have to go back to normal at the end so making those big changes is harder.
  - sunshinerag 7y ago
    Exactly people would behave differently if they knew it was permanent vs temporary.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - felipemnoa 7y ago
      So, look at the people that win $1k a week for life and see how that turns out. https://nylottery.ny.gov/scratch-off/two-dollar/win-life https://nylottery.ny.gov/scratch-off/two-dollar/win-life
      - rapind 7y ago
        I think you'd then be skewing towards a sample that spends a lot of money on lottery tickets (certainly not something I do but maybe I'm the minority), and your sample size would be pretty small, and you wouldn't see how it affects a community.
  - EthanHeilman 7y ago
    You can argue that the only way to perform a completely accurate UBI experiment would be to run it for at least 60-80 years for everyone. Social experiments are very hard to do and have many flaws, but it seems unreasonable to say that the information gained by doing such studies should be "thrown out the window".
    - datashow 7y ago
      This issue is not a "flaw". It's a root problem. We want to know the effect of permanent UBI, not of a temporary one, and we know (strongly suspect) the effect will be different. Maybe the simple solution is that the researchers establish a dedicated million dollar bank account for a participant and automatically withdraw $1000 for the participant every month.
      - nostrebored 7y ago
        Still completely irrelevant as the U in UBI comes with a lot of externalities
      - learnstats2 7y ago
        But there is no such thing as "permanent UBI", though. UBI is a political decision which is renewed with every government. The perspective of the participants makes sense. Whether they believe their access to UBI will continue or not, it makes sense to up-skill. Besides, we do know how people behave when they are born with a million dollar bank account, and it's relatively very rare that they are criticised for how they choose to live.
        zazaalaza 7y ago
        "UBI is a political decision which is renewed with every government" If this is true than implementing UBI will be more problematic than I thought. All UBI proposals so far call for all other financial safety nets to be removed in order to finance UBI. Managing that will be a nightmare if you can just cut off UBI, then you have to spin up everything else again. I imagine UBI to be something similar to how the pension system is, once in place it stays there forever-ish (meaning that it can potentially collapse). "we do know how people behave when they are born with a million dollar bank account, and it's relatively very rare that they are criticised for how they choose to live" - that's an excellent point.
  - eeZah7Ux 7y ago
    While this is technically true, it's also true for every other political changes. All human behaviors are affected by knowing that something is going to end soon or not. Yet, UBI is often held under strict scrutiny. While the status quo is not challenged in the same way.
  - SuoDuanDao 7y ago
    The effects are generally thought to converge after two years.
    - pmiller2 7y ago
      Citation needed.
      - SuoDuanDao 7y ago
        Not sure the timestamp, it was a while ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rL6gJkdlNU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rL6gJkdlNU
  - dimitry12 7y ago
    Or keep the studies and make UBI non-permanent: much like cold-war brinkmanship - incentivizing recipients to always keep in mind the possibility of future work. I understand it's much more stressful than permanent guaranteed UBI, but it's truer to the real intent of UBI (which I believe is reducing the friction when deciding to try new job or state or whatever in a pursuit of self-actualization).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
crispyambulance 7y ago
> Sounds like a success to me. I like the concept too, but we have to be careful what we wish for. If, somehow, UBI becomes real there will be a huge push from the libertarians and far-right to dismantle whatever is left of the social safety net. They actually would love the idea of replacing medicare, social security and other programs with a quick 1000/month that would enable even more shrinking of government.
- sjwright 7y ago
  Medicare isn’t going anywhere. Once people get the taste for single payer healthcare, they don't give it up. Social security should be replaced with privately held accounts, just like superannuation in Australia. But in the transition people would need to be paid out their entitlement. So no problem there. But if UBI replaced all normal welfare (excluding disability etc) is that such a bad thing? As long as the UBI is high enough and indexed to cost of living, welfare that’s broadly targeted at the poor should be unnecessary. Not just unnecessary, it tends to have the effect of making poverty stickier. Any time benefits are inversely tied to how well you're doing, you reduce the incentive to do better.
  - mikemotherwell 7y ago
    > But if UBI replaced all normal welfare (excluding disability etc) is that such a bad thing? Part of the problem is that some welfare is not about the money, but the support. UBI is less likely to help someone with mental issues than someone who hates working at 7/11 while studying. Generalised, UBI likely helps those who have an impermanent problem over those that have longer term issues. Society likely would still need welfare services for those people who struggle with the multiple travails of existence. Personally, I'm less interested in UBI in the first world, where welfare is pretty good already and the negative affects are unknown and complicated. I'm more interested in what affect it would have on the third world, where the downsides - disincentives to work etc - seem far less of an issue. https://www.givedirectly.org/ubi-study/ https://www.givedirectly.org/ubi-study/ is a good example.
    - 7y ago
tic_tac 7y ago
The point of UBI is not to fund people's vanity adventures in education. It's to support people who would otherwise be starving or homeless without a job. Regarding "sickness", the severity is important to know. If UBI enables people with slight depression issues to just give up working entirely, UBI could be entirely counterproductive by accelerating depression's spirals of inactivity. And this completely ignored the issue of inflation that comes with society wide UBI. The whole notion of UBI is nonsense. Rather than throwing money at people to spend on broken institutions like Education and Healthcare, let's reform these institutions in the first place to make them more affordable and effective.
- godelski 7y ago
  > The point of UBI is not to fund people's vanity adventures in education. It's to support people who would otherwise be starving or homeless without a job. Who gave this strict definition. In my opinion, the point of UBI is to benefit society. I do think people being more educated benefits society as a whole, and thus I think people using their UBI on this is beneficial.
- einpoklum 7y ago
  So, education is a "vanity adventure"? Perhaps if you're a person who looks at your cleaners or servers or cashiers as people with no potential for self-betterment; as people who are unable to expand their horizons. Ugh.
  - tic_tac 7y ago
    As it is structured today, yes it is. The majority of people study Psychology, Sociology, Economics or something of that nature then go on to make power point slides or enter numbers in Excel all day for the rest of their lives. Enabling this sort of broken system is exactly what UBI as currently imagined will do. The problem with progressive crusades like UBI is that they completely ignore reality... UBI will only increase the cost of education while simultaneously decreasing its value as a signaling mechanism, which is where the majority of modern education's value lies in the first place. Let me repeat from my original comment: UBI on a societal scale will only cause inflation without an increase in real income. It's a true waste of money and nonsensical in practice. That's why it's so horrifying to see people who should know better continue to try to meme it into existence and simply reminds all sober observers how divorced modern "progressivism" is from reality.
blackflame7000 7y ago
Education does not equate to a successful job. I know a few career students that acquire one useless degree after another because every time they try to get a job they find no one is hiring.
- godelski 7y ago
  Education does correlate with a more successful job and it also correlates with a better functioning society. I believe that there is plenty of evidence to suggest that there is some causal relationship (note: this does not say that higher education leads to a successful job, but rather says that higher education increases the chances of you getting a more successful job).
  - blackflame7000 7y ago
    No, because you can be educated in any topic up to and including the history of the Kardashians. This in no way contributes to a better functioning society. Your entire premise that education = more intelligence is completely wrong. Would you argue a person educated by extremists correlates with a better functioning society? The only thing that betters society is the positive application of knowledge to creating something of value for others. It's not enough to learn a topic, you must actually apply it make a difference.
    - godelski 7y ago
      It is unclear to me if you are being obtuse on purpose or on accident. But I want to reiterate that trolling is not allowed on HN and it is presumed that you are going to take arguments on good faith. So I will answer as if you aren't being needlessly obtuse. We're talking about institutional education, not gaining more information. So in this discussion we're not talking about people spending their money to become more informed on Kardashians. We're talking about them going to school. As far as I'm aware, there's no school that teaches the history of the Kardashians.
      - CompBrogrammer 7y ago
djrhbedjkdi 7y ago
>Almost half of people who stopped working did it in order to train for a better job. That's great! Ahahaha, 50% of people not faffing around would count as success to you? You pay the taxes for that then. >Receiving BI allowed sick people to not be forced into work to pay for a basic existence? That's great! Such an improvement! The old method of just buying some aspirin really got put in its place here! Please, this sort of optimism is indicative of why this won't fly in America. I don't know if you're European or just really like rose colored glasses but these are the kinds of outcomes that doom policy proposals in America. If you're going to live on someone else's dime you're /expected/ to be wretched beyond reproach or guranteed to do something worthwhile. No one is going to be clapping for the tax that 50% of the time breeds couch potatoes.
thereare5lights 7y ago
I can't upvote this comment enough. The parent comment was so egregious in its misrepresentation of the study.
- Thorentis 7y ago
  It didn't misrepresent anything. If I was enrolled in a study where I was given free money, I'd stop working and pursue study or other interests too. Seems like these people knew the study was temporary, and took advantage of it. A permanent basic income would produce results no study is capable of measuring.
  - thereare5lights 7y ago
    Wrong. Parent said > 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. Child comment proved this to be misleading. I myself was misled. Anyone reading this would think that this study showed that UBI disincentivizes work. Child comment showed that this conclusion does not follow from the study. You can speculate all you want on what permanent UBI would do but what the parent comment said is absolutely a misrepresentation of the study.
    - Thorentis 7y ago
      Wrong. Parent was correct in quoting the study. 17% were unemployed. What were they doing instead? Studying, or not working (with a small minority on sick leave). From this we can conclude that: UBI encourages people to leave the workforce, or this study encouraged people to leave the workforce. Studying is still a productivity activity in the right context, but you cannot pretend it is the same as being employed from the perspective of analysing the economic impacts of UBI.
      - 7y ago

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.
  - Revery 7y ago
    I think his statement that these UBI experiments yield little insight into how actual UBI could play out full-scale holds water without a source.
  - zepto 7y ago
    It’s a logical challenge to the ecological validity of the study. No citation is needed for straightforward observations.
  - zazaalaza 7y ago
    What I am saying is that a temporary UBI experiment cannot simulate the changes that a permanent UBI would bring. Especially when everyone is aware that this is temporary.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    The main thing being said is there's a drastic difference between knowing the BI you're getting is temporary and it being a 'permanent' government program. There's no way to provide a citation for that because the only way to run that is to have a full UBI and study the results to see if these short term BI studies still hold water. However it's not a stretch at all to say people will act different when they're temporarily receiving money than when they'll receive it 'forever'.
    - blackflame7000 7y ago
      In fact it's well known that disposable vs fixed income directly impacts the financial decisions people make
      - rtkwe 7y ago
        The main argument I, and I believe the OP, was making is because the period of these programs are limited, and not even the full period is guaranteed as this shows, it affects how people act. If it's a program I believe I can count on existing for 10-20 years I can make significant life changes around receiving the money, eg move somewhere super cheap and volunteer or something, but at just a few I know I'm going to have to go back to normal at the end so making those big changes is harder.
- sunshinerag 7y ago
  Exactly people would behave differently if they knew it was permanent vs temporary.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - felipemnoa 7y ago
    So, look at the people that win $1k a week for life and see how that turns out. https://nylottery.ny.gov/scratch-off/two-dollar/win-life https://nylottery.ny.gov/scratch-off/two-dollar/win-life
    - rapind 7y ago
      I think you'd then be skewing towards a sample that spends a lot of money on lottery tickets (certainly not something I do but maybe I'm the minority), and your sample size would be pretty small, and you wouldn't see how it affects a community.
- EthanHeilman 7y ago
  You can argue that the only way to perform a completely accurate UBI experiment would be to run it for at least 60-80 years for everyone. Social experiments are very hard to do and have many flaws, but it seems unreasonable to say that the information gained by doing such studies should be "thrown out the window".
  - datashow 7y ago
    This issue is not a "flaw". It's a root problem. We want to know the effect of permanent UBI, not of a temporary one, and we know (strongly suspect) the effect will be different. Maybe the simple solution is that the researchers establish a dedicated million dollar bank account for a participant and automatically withdraw $1000 for the participant every month.
    - nostrebored 7y ago
      Still completely irrelevant as the U in UBI comes with a lot of externalities
    - learnstats2 7y ago
      But there is no such thing as "permanent UBI", though. UBI is a political decision which is renewed with every government. The perspective of the participants makes sense. Whether they believe their access to UBI will continue or not, it makes sense to up-skill. Besides, we do know how people behave when they are born with a million dollar bank account, and it's relatively very rare that they are criticised for how they choose to live.
      - zazaalaza 7y ago
        "UBI is a political decision which is renewed with every government" If this is true than implementing UBI will be more problematic than I thought. All UBI proposals so far call for all other financial safety nets to be removed in order to finance UBI. Managing that will be a nightmare if you can just cut off UBI, then you have to spin up everything else again. I imagine UBI to be something similar to how the pension system is, once in place it stays there forever-ish (meaning that it can potentially collapse). "we do know how people behave when they are born with a million dollar bank account, and it's relatively very rare that they are criticised for how they choose to live" - that's an excellent point.
- eeZah7Ux 7y ago
  While this is technically true, it's also true for every other political changes. All human behaviors are affected by knowing that something is going to end soon or not. Yet, UBI is often held under strict scrutiny. While the status quo is not challenged in the same way.
- SuoDuanDao 7y ago
  The effects are generally thought to converge after two years.
  - pmiller2 7y ago
    Citation needed.
    - SuoDuanDao 7y ago
      Not sure the timestamp, it was a while ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rL6gJkdlNU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rL6gJkdlNU
- dimitry12 7y ago
  Or keep the studies and make UBI non-permanent: much like cold-war brinkmanship - incentivizing recipients to always keep in mind the possibility of future work. I understand it's much more stressful than permanent guaranteed UBI, but it's truer to the real intent of UBI (which I believe is reducing the friction when deciding to try new job or state or whatever in a pursuit of self-actualization).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

crispyambulance 7y ago

> Sounds like a success to me. I like the concept too, but we have to be careful what we wish for. If, somehow, UBI becomes real there will be a huge push from the libertarians and far-right to dismantle whatever is left of the social safety net. They actually would love the idea of replacing medicare, social security and other programs with a quick 1000/month that would enable even more shrinking of government.

sjwright 7y ago
Medicare isn’t going anywhere. Once people get the taste for single payer healthcare, they don't give it up. Social security should be replaced with privately held accounts, just like superannuation in Australia. But in the transition people would need to be paid out their entitlement. So no problem there. But if UBI replaced all normal welfare (excluding disability etc) is that such a bad thing? As long as the UBI is high enough and indexed to cost of living, welfare that’s broadly targeted at the poor should be unnecessary. Not just unnecessary, it tends to have the effect of making poverty stickier. Any time benefits are inversely tied to how well you're doing, you reduce the incentive to do better.
- mikemotherwell 7y ago
  > But if UBI replaced all normal welfare (excluding disability etc) is that such a bad thing? Part of the problem is that some welfare is not about the money, but the support. UBI is less likely to help someone with mental issues than someone who hates working at 7/11 while studying. Generalised, UBI likely helps those who have an impermanent problem over those that have longer term issues. Society likely would still need welfare services for those people who struggle with the multiple travails of existence. Personally, I'm less interested in UBI in the first world, where welfare is pretty good already and the negative affects are unknown and complicated. I'm more interested in what affect it would have on the third world, where the downsides - disincentives to work etc - seem far less of an issue. https://www.givedirectly.org/ubi-study/ https://www.givedirectly.org/ubi-study/ is a good example.
  - 7y ago

tic_tac 7y ago

The point of UBI is not to fund people's vanity adventures in education. It's to support people who would otherwise be starving or homeless without a job. Regarding "sickness", the severity is important to know. If UBI enables people with slight depression issues to just give up working entirely, UBI could be entirely counterproductive by accelerating depression's spirals of inactivity. And this completely ignored the issue of inflation that comes with society wide UBI. The whole notion of UBI is nonsense. Rather than throwing money at people to spend on broken institutions like Education and Healthcare, let's reform these institutions in the first place to make them more affordable and effective.

godelski 7y ago
> The point of UBI is not to fund people's vanity adventures in education. It's to support people who would otherwise be starving or homeless without a job. Who gave this strict definition. In my opinion, the point of UBI is to benefit society. I do think people being more educated benefits society as a whole, and thus I think people using their UBI on this is beneficial.
einpoklum 7y ago
So, education is a "vanity adventure"? Perhaps if you're a person who looks at your cleaners or servers or cashiers as people with no potential for self-betterment; as people who are unable to expand their horizons. Ugh.
- tic_tac 7y ago
  As it is structured today, yes it is. The majority of people study Psychology, Sociology, Economics or something of that nature then go on to make power point slides or enter numbers in Excel all day for the rest of their lives. Enabling this sort of broken system is exactly what UBI as currently imagined will do. The problem with progressive crusades like UBI is that they completely ignore reality... UBI will only increase the cost of education while simultaneously decreasing its value as a signaling mechanism, which is where the majority of modern education's value lies in the first place. Let me repeat from my original comment: UBI on a societal scale will only cause inflation without an increase in real income. It's a true waste of money and nonsensical in practice. That's why it's so horrifying to see people who should know better continue to try to meme it into existence and simply reminds all sober observers how divorced modern "progressivism" is from reality.

blackflame7000 7y ago

Education does not equate to a successful job. I know a few career students that acquire one useless degree after another because every time they try to get a job they find no one is hiring.

godelski 7y ago
Education does correlate with a more successful job and it also correlates with a better functioning society. I believe that there is plenty of evidence to suggest that there is some causal relationship (note: this does not say that higher education leads to a successful job, but rather says that higher education increases the chances of you getting a more successful job).
- blackflame7000 7y ago
  No, because you can be educated in any topic up to and including the history of the Kardashians. This in no way contributes to a better functioning society. Your entire premise that education = more intelligence is completely wrong. Would you argue a person educated by extremists correlates with a better functioning society? The only thing that betters society is the positive application of knowledge to creating something of value for others. It's not enough to learn a topic, you must actually apply it make a difference.
  - godelski 7y ago
    It is unclear to me if you are being obtuse on purpose or on accident. But I want to reiterate that trolling is not allowed on HN and it is presumed that you are going to take arguments on good faith. So I will answer as if you aren't being needlessly obtuse. We're talking about institutional education, not gaining more information. So in this discussion we're not talking about people spending their money to become more informed on Kardashians. We're talking about them going to school. As far as I'm aware, there's no school that teaches the history of the Kardashians.
    - CompBrogrammer 7y ago

djrhbedjkdi 7y ago

>Almost half of people who stopped working did it in order to train for a better job. That's great! Ahahaha, 50% of people not faffing around would count as success to you? You pay the taxes for that then. >Receiving BI allowed sick people to not be forced into work to pay for a basic existence? That's great! Such an improvement! The old method of just buying some aspirin really got put in its place here! Please, this sort of optimism is indicative of why this won't fly in America. I don't know if you're European or just really like rose colored glasses but these are the kinds of outcomes that doom policy proposals in America. If you're going to live on someone else's dime you're /expected/ to be wretched beyond reproach or guranteed to do something worthwhile. No one is going to be clapping for the tax that 50% of the time breeds couch potatoes.

thereare5lights 7y ago

I can't upvote this comment enough. The parent comment was so egregious in its misrepresentation of the study.

Thorentis 7y ago
It didn't misrepresent anything. If I was enrolled in a study where I was given free money, I'd stop working and pursue study or other interests too. Seems like these people knew the study was temporary, and took advantage of it. A permanent basic income would produce results no study is capable of measuring.
- thereare5lights 7y ago
  Wrong. Parent said > 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. Child comment proved this to be misleading. I myself was misled. Anyone reading this would think that this study showed that UBI disincentivizes work. Child comment showed that this conclusion does not follow from the study. You can speculate all you want on what permanent UBI would do but what the parent comment said is absolutely a misrepresentation of the study.
  - Thorentis 7y ago
    Wrong. Parent was correct in quoting the study. 17% were unemployed. What were they doing instead? Studying, or not working (with a small minority on sick leave). From this we can conclude that: UBI encourages people to leave the workforce, or this study encouraged people to leave the workforce. Studying is still a productivity activity in the right context, but you cannot pretend it is the same as being employed from the perspective of analysing the economic impacts of UBI.
    - 7y ago