15 ms·

The promising results of Stockton’s basic income experiment

61 points by mitchbob 6y ago

LatteLazy 6y ago
Non paywalled: https://outline.com/2dA7jj https://outline.com/2dA7jj
phepranto 6y ago
I realize there's no data on this, but do these localized experiments translate into actual UBI at all? I only skimmed the article but it seems to me that giving 125 people 500$/Month, which come from a donation to research UBI, has basically no relation to actual UBI. They found that giving those 125 people an unconditional monthly allowance helps them survive and has a positive effect on their life. They did not seem to research at all how to actually fund it, what kind of effect a higher tax to fund it would have, or what would happen to the government employees currently working in social welfare if they'd lose their job.
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  In fairness, funding and spending are 2 separate problems. Other people can independently do research on whether a particular tax or some other spending cut is the best way to fund this. I agree the same size is small (I thought it was 525), and I'd also say there is an issue with the length of the study. But it should still provide some useful stats on how many people give up work or start businesses or go back to school and what the impact is on crime, drug use etc... And that's the question here: how does this effect people's economic and social behaviour?
  - notahacker 6y ago
    > But it should still provide some useful stats on how many people give up work or start businesses or go back to school and what the impact is on crime, drug use etc... Why would "here's an extra $9k across 18 months" tell you anything about how a low income person would respond to being promised a livable income for life?
    - LatteLazy 6y ago
      Because for those 18 months their lives would be different. I'd like to see a 5+ yr study specifically because that would allow people to give up low paying jobs, go get a full degree and then get a new better paying job. 18 months isn't that, obviously. But it would allow you to go and do something. Instead of going from being a waiter to a programmer, maybe you can go from being a waiter to a basic plumber or a truck driver or start a small business or something? We can all agree that having more cash will improve people health\community\whatever. The big question is what will people do with the opportunity no-strings-attached cash gives them. How many people will just spend the money? How many people will stop working and do nothing useful? How many people will stop working and do something very very useful? You only need a small proportion of people to make significant changes like this (and thus pay a lot more tax) and suddenly these programs get very affordable net.
      - notahacker 6y ago
        You need a very large proportion to make changes like that if it's offset by people using the money to retire from working life altogether[1]. Since this choice can't be made with this study design, it tells us nothing about what people would actually do with no-strings attached money for life, and indeed actively distorts the reality of how people will respond by at least as much as that other great UBI experiment no UBI advocate ever talks about: state pensions.... [1]actually you need an implausibly large proportion simply to offset the amount of people who already don't work and aren't entitled to benefit payments who would be eligible to receive UBI
        LatteLazy 6y ago
        Respectfully, that is exactly what we need an experiment to prove\disprove. At least some people took this 9k as an opportunity to sit at home playing video games. At least some got a (small) education or started a business. The issue with pensions as an example of UBI is that the only people getting them are old. So they mostly already have the assets they want, they don't have careers they want to improve, they don't want to start business or earn money, they want to retire...
- nlitened 6y ago
  They should have also collected monthly a total of $62500 extra “taxes” from all these people — the higher the income, the bigger the tax share.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    tbf since their targeting was low income neighbourhoods, one can assume the higher income neighbourhoods would have contributed some of the share. A fair experiment would have at least stripped away all the other state funded benefits UBI supposedly replaces, but I guess 'UBI is good for the spending power of single-income couples but leaves the poorest people much worse off' wasn't the headline the advocacy group was shooting for...
  - moduspol 6y ago
    Why $62500? The participants should be voting on how much to take from those among them with the higher incomes. I mean--unless we're assessing how UBI might work in a country without democracy.
    - AdrianB1 6y ago
      Democracy is not a free pas to vote anything, especially if it is negatively impact some people, otherwise you justify gang rapes as a majority decision.
      - moduspol 6y ago
        Sure, but it's tough to imagine in today's climate that a majority of voters living only on UBI would vote to maintain or lower the amount of money given directly to them from the top X%. We already have the issue today but it's not quite so direct.
        AdrianB1 6y ago
        This is a huge problem with UBI. Maybe people will have to make a choice, either live on UBI or vote, but not both - it is immoral to vote for your own benefits.
- Toutouxc 6y ago
  Also what kind of effect on pricing it would have. Surely if everyone's baseline income increases, it creates a safe buffer-of-a-sort that necessities' prices (housing, food) can comfortably consume.
  - aptwebapps 6y ago
    Wouldn't the naive expectation be that prices would rise somewhat but that if the markets in question were competitive that this would not be severe?
    - harry8 6y ago
      I direct your attention to the market for "housing"
      - aptwebapps 6y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23857621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23857621 gets at what I was thinking but was too lazy to articulate.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - mdorazio 6y ago
        Housing prices are barely correlated with incomes in a meaningful way across cities, let alone caused by them. See [1]. The #1 determinant of housing prices is supply, which is usually an issue of regulation, not of local ability to pay rent/mortgage. There's not much consensus on this topic among economists since there are so many confounding factors - the best paper I've seen so far is [2] which finds that income increases via minimum wage hikes might increase rents anywhere from a quarter to a half of the wage increase, absent other factors. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/07/heres-the-share-of-income-that-goes-to-rent-in-cities-across-the-us.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/07/heres-the-share-of-income-th... [2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3282661 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3282661
- kingkawn 6y ago
  One step at a time to open peoples’ minds
- roenxi 6y ago
  > They did not seem to research at all how to actually fund it And this is really the most profound part. There isn't an argument to be made against "if people have more money to buy stuff they will be better off". Nobody can argue against that, it is true. The _entire_ case against that sort of social spending is "but we need normal people to create more than they consume or the resources won't be available" and "this isn't fair on the people who have to support them" argued at varying levels of complexity and indirection. If you ignore the negative outcomes then any plan is a good plan and only has positive outcomes. Duh.
  - lukevp 6y ago
    I disagree, it’s not the fairness, or the overproduction, but the best overall benefit to society given the money spent. Social programs that already exist are a progressive tax that penalizes healthy, working people more than those who are receiving the benefit. Examples: unemployment, Medicaid, WIC, Saver’s Credit.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - danaris 6y ago
    The level of productivity per capita in the economy today is vastly more than enough to supply our entire population with only a fraction working. There's also plenty of information indicating that if given the choice, most people actually want to work...they just don't want to be working shit jobs for shit pay for shit bosses.
    - Ericson2314 6y ago
      Amen, how many times to we need to tell people, look production and consumption first, and then think about finance? I'm not saying finance is all bad, I'm saying when the financial situation is harder to understand than the so-called "real economy"...don't!
  - DonaldFisk 6y ago
- enaaem 6y ago
  I don't see the point of these small studies at all. Many people already have some form of UBI like pensioners. That their lives are pretty relaxed should come as no surprise. The most important thing to study is the effect of UBI on total economy. Saudi Arabia is an interesting example, since their economy pretty much runs on free oil money. Saudi nationals are notorious for having bad work ethics, and they have to import many foreign workers to run the economy. To prepare the country for a post oil world companies are now required to hire a minimum percentage of Saudi nationals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudization
  - larrydag 6y ago
    This is one of the macroeconomic scenarios that scares me the most. I can't imagine what would happen to the global socio-economic stability if those middle east countries were to lose that source of GDP. It's not to unreasonable to conceive either as more countries are becoming oil energy independent.
    - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > what would happen to the global socio-economic stability if those middle east countries were to lose that source of GDP Tumultuous transition period followed by quiet. The same wealth that currently placates them also enables them to project power. And when the wealth disappears, infighting is more likely than outward violence. After the initial period of reorganisation, it will settle into a state similar to other formerly-wealth now-impoverished nations.
      - Ericson2314 6y ago
        Yeah, the extreme contrast between the countries that have and don't have oil in the middle east is what creates the conflict.
    - neutronicus 6y ago
      If the rest of the world is oil-independent, I imagine it will truck on regardless of any post-oil chaos in the former oil-producing regions.
- GhostVII 6y ago
  Another question I never see answered is if people are better off on UBI instead of welfare/food stamps/etc. Most of the time I hear people talking about finding UBI, they say it will replace existing social programs, but no UBI experiment that I have seen actually tests if people are better off with cash instead of social assistance.
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    That’s a great point. Social services are about more than cash. We give mothers baby formula because we want babies to have adequate nutrition. If you hand out cash, some percentage of people will buy beer instead.
    - controversy 6y ago
      This is a valid point. I’ve never seen a response to how you make sure the spending goes to the resources. While one can argue that the people should be adults, reality shows that is not true. Having the infrastructure to pay rent automatically by the government means rent is paid. What do we do when people piss away their UBI and don’t have money for the necessities?
      - DonaldFisk 6y ago
        Anyone who intentionally did that would soon find themselves without accommodation or food. If it's because they can't budget, it could be paid to them weekly or even daily. People who can't manage their own lives (e.g. mentally ill, drug addicts) would need to be given help, whatever safety net there is.
        controversy 6y ago
        The point of UBI is to remove non-private charity support. How will politicians react when people are dying in the streets? The US is not about persons responsiblity.
        Spooky23 6y ago
- DonaldFisk 6y ago
  How do you propose that UBI be tested? If you give it to a small number of people, or to everyone for a limited time, it's argued it isn't UBI. Various services are funded out of taxation at present. The higher gross tax rate would be offset by UBI (those in work would get it too), so the mean net tax rate shouldn't change much. What would happen to the government employees currently working in social welfare if they'd lose their job is that they'd get UBI until they were given or found more productive work.
- ElFitz 6y ago
  There has been an accidental larger study: https://www.wired.com/story/free-money-the-surprising-effects-of-a-basic-income-supplied-by-government/ https://www.wired.com/story/free-money-the-surprising-effect...
jakeogh 6y ago
Hey, don't worry; we are just taxing the negative externalities of your existence. This is an authoritarian dream, and it's why cash has a big target on it. Got a fine? Deduct it. Putting people on the take gives government significantly more leverage over them. Next up is to incrementally pair it with a social credit score. The concept is fundamentally against free expression; it's the same old model used keep large fractions of social classes from becoming independent. Real solutions involve decentralization and less tax on _time_, the power players want cheap labor, so they were allowed to import it. That scam is well known now, so onto plan B. This is really a proposal for extreme centralization via hidden tax on value producers. It's a deliberate problem; hence the Hegel soluton.
- perfunctory 6y ago
  > Next up is to incrementally pair it with a social credit score Which part of “unconditional” do you not understand?
  - HPsquared 6y ago
    Policies have a habit of changing over time.
    - perfunctory 6y ago
      By this logic we should never ever make any new policies lest they evolve into something undesirable.
      - mamon 6y ago
        I think all libertanians would agree with that logic :) In theory you should be able to come up with some minimal necessary set of laws and policies, pass apropriate parlimentary bills once, and after that parliament becomes unncecessary, or maybe it just gathers in session once a year, to evaluate the need for new laws. Also, to encourage long-term thinking it should be written into Constitution that any new law passed can only take effect 10 years after it was passed, not sooner.
Proven 6y ago
This would be funny if it wasn't sad (the ignorance of the Marxists who made this happen and the writer). Who's going to work (or, why would anyone work) and pay for BI if they can get by on BI and a bit of undeclared work on the side? Next article in the series: the promising results of city-wide looting (people found to be better off, store owners made whole by the rich insurance companies - eff yeah!)
mchusma 6y ago
I think UBI is an essential concept and believe will be no way around it in some fashion. That said, "AB testing" it is really hard. The real idea behind UBI (for most advocates) is that it is a living wage granted for a very long time (something like lifetimes). $500/mo for a few months or years means that people need to still plan around that loss of income, and are unlikely to act too differently. I like research, but I don't really see much benefit here. I think you justify UBI on these grounds: 1) administration costs are much higher for welfare states than UBI (the US spends more on anti poverty programs than it would take to distribute funds and make nobody below the US poverty line). This should appeal to fiscal conservatives. Our anti poverty programs have failed not due to resources, but rather due to centralized, command and control techniques a la ISSUE. 2) the number of people that are completely unemployable (they are not able to outcompete machines/AI at any narrow job function) will increase. Number (2) is more speculative for most people, but having automated away many jobs myself, I can see that the only reason things are not more automated is the will of leaders to automate. Most people lack the will, but that won't stop it in the long run, only slow it.
- notahacker 6y ago
  The big problem with (1) is that it's unambiguously falsified by widely available data. Approximately 75 million working age US citizens are 'economically inactive' in normal times - i.e. they're not working or paying income/payroll taxes, and in most cases are ineligible for any other type of benefit. The US poverty line is 12k. You're not finding all that extra money from admin costs
debacle 6y ago
This isn't a basic income experiment. It's a grant-based income subsidy. What a real basic income experiment would look like: - Take a nominally populated county. - Calculate a baseline income requirement necessary to live in the county. - Completely gut all of the economic service programs (carefully without breaking federal law). - Pool all that extra money together and divide it by the population. - Add some sort of VAT to county sales to cover the difference between what UBI should be and how much money is in the kitty. - Do a test run of at least 18-24 months. Things to pay attention to: - County sales tax receipts. - School attendance. - Employment, especially seasonal employment. - Crime. - Costs of groceries, restaurants, contractor services, etc. - Mean age of retirement. - Employment of those 18-25. - Rent prices Things to consider: - Are state pensions on the chopping block? - Are you going to implement basic income as UBI + earned income or the greater of the two? - Is there any opportunity to debit federally mandated economic support from the UBI totals? Hurdles: - Without buy in at the state level, how are you going to prevent people from buying their groceries across county lines, or doing most of their retail online? - Unless you pick the county properly (a proper mix of employment + age demographics), you'll have large problems on your hand. - Serious local, national, and possibly international pressure to derail the program.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  That's certainly one way to do it. Maybe the best way. But there's all sorts of things to study, and it may be valuable to try and study them in isolation.
  - debacle 6y ago
    The psychological and resultant behavioral impact on tax base whales and the liquidity of labor are the most important things to study. I can't reasonably think of a means to study those outside of an academic scenario.
- amanaplanacanal 6y ago
  I know that where I live, state pensions can’t be touched, as the state Supreme Court has determined they are owned by the employees, not by the state.
amINeolib 6y ago
Not real UBI. I want to see an end to food stamps and housing subsidies and Medicare taxes before you call it UBI.
christiansakai 6y ago
I am concerned that UBI as a whole will make the divorce between economy and productivity, just like artificial pumping by the government divorces stock market from the economy. An individual will have this illusion of they are fine in life, as long as UBI coming in, even though they are not productive at all. Stability of a government is never guaranteed. What if one day, for whatever reason, whether the government go rogue, or the government has no more money or assets, decide to stop UBI. A lot of people will suddenly be unprepared to come to terms with the actual reality, that they don't have the needed marketable skills to survive in the world because they have been living off UBI all these times without cultivating themselves.
- leoedin 6y ago
  That's only the case if most people are happy sitting back and living off UBI. That's not a given. I've known people who inherited reasonable sums of money - enough to live a frugal life for a decade or so. None of them have quit their jobs and lived frugally for a decade. What that money has allowed is security. It's allowed them to take career risks, or go back to university and retrain. That's obviously anecdotal - my network skews educated and career driven to start with. It would be interesting to know how many people would just sit back and do nothing. It would also be interesting to know how inflationary the effect of everyone having that UBI would be - so much of the value of money comes from its relative scarcity, so maybe we'd find that if everyone has a basic income then the threshold for security just goes up. I'm not sure how we'd establish that without trying it though.
- ksdale 6y ago
  I agree with you completely that it's a problem when society as a whole doesn't have a good idea of what it means to be "productive" but I think that in your second sentence, you could just as easily replace "UBI" with "wages" and the truthfulness of it doesn't change at all. I think working for wages doesn't allow most people to do what I would consider "cultivating themselves," and possessing "marketable" skills is not the same thing as possessing useful skills. Obviously we all have our own definitions of "productive" (I actually like to think of it more as useful rather than profitable) but my own personal opinion is that what is useful and what people get paid for have as little overlap as they've ever had, so the risk of replacing certain jobs with UBI isn't actually as much of a threat to productivity as it might seem like.
steve76 6y ago
Destroy people with the ugliest and dirtiest tricks imaginable. Then pay them off to stop a civil revolt or mass die off. How about you just stop being mean to people? Walk away, give back instead of chasing endless celebrity? If you want to be Mother Theresa, first join a nunnery. This is battle royal, a free for all on the Serenghetti. You're not fooling anyone. Let's say a human traffic victim shows up with a fake ID. You have to pay a check, right? Some killer shows up on payday and beats her up, along with a hundred others, and sends the money back to Haiti or the Philippines to smuggle in nerve gas or fentanyl. Not only does that happen, that's the norm not the exception. Go live in the real world please. See what people really are like. You don't want to do the right thing. You don't want to make things better. You don't want to even have a good time. You want power, and be the only one who has power. You will do anything because once you stop, you have to be accountable to all your past crimes. Easiest way to win an election? Push out voters with high standards that make you work. Bring in voters with no standards who vote because they are told.
throw51319 6y ago
Are a lot of people going to use the UBI to better themselves? A large number will probably end up hanging out. Or work a few years to save for a downpayment, then end up hanging out. It will prob speed up automation. Like some 40 year old with no skills is gonna suddenly re-skill and being a computer programmer? Lol. Just gonna be a bunch of people chilling on the taxpayers dime. Reproducing, taking up space, etc. Everything is going to be a sharp bimodal distribution. Those that are productive, get paid a ton. Those who aren't productive and just chill all day on UBI.

61 points by mitchbob 6y ago

Non paywalled: https://outline.com/2dA7jj https://outline.com/2dA7jj

I realize there's no data on this, but do these localized experiments translate into actual UBI at all? I only skimmed the article but it seems to me that giving 125 people 500$/Month, which come from a donation to research UBI, has basically no relation to actual UBI. They found that giving those 125 people an unconditional monthly allowance helps them survive and has a positive effect on their life. They did not seem to research at all how to actually fund it, what kind of effect a higher tax to fund it would have, or what would happen to the government employees currently working in social welfare if they'd lose their job.

LatteLazy 6y ago
In fairness, funding and spending are 2 separate problems. Other people can independently do research on whether a particular tax or some other spending cut is the best way to fund this. I agree the same size is small (I thought it was 525), and I'd also say there is an issue with the length of the study. But it should still provide some useful stats on how many people give up work or start businesses or go back to school and what the impact is on crime, drug use etc... And that's the question here: how does this effect people's economic and social behaviour?
- notahacker 6y ago
  > But it should still provide some useful stats on how many people give up work or start businesses or go back to school and what the impact is on crime, drug use etc... Why would "here's an extra $9k across 18 months" tell you anything about how a low income person would respond to being promised a livable income for life?
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    Because for those 18 months their lives would be different. I'd like to see a 5+ yr study specifically because that would allow people to give up low paying jobs, go get a full degree and then get a new better paying job. 18 months isn't that, obviously. But it would allow you to go and do something. Instead of going from being a waiter to a programmer, maybe you can go from being a waiter to a basic plumber or a truck driver or start a small business or something? We can all agree that having more cash will improve people health\community\whatever. The big question is what will people do with the opportunity no-strings-attached cash gives them. How many people will just spend the money? How many people will stop working and do nothing useful? How many people will stop working and do something very very useful? You only need a small proportion of people to make significant changes like this (and thus pay a lot more tax) and suddenly these programs get very affordable net.
    - notahacker 6y ago
      You need a very large proportion to make changes like that if it's offset by people using the money to retire from working life altogether[1]. Since this choice can't be made with this study design, it tells us nothing about what people would actually do with no-strings attached money for life, and indeed actively distorts the reality of how people will respond by at least as much as that other great UBI experiment no UBI advocate ever talks about: state pensions.... [1]actually you need an implausibly large proportion simply to offset the amount of people who already don't work and aren't entitled to benefit payments who would be eligible to receive UBI
      - LatteLazy 6y ago
        Respectfully, that is exactly what we need an experiment to prove\disprove. At least some people took this 9k as an opportunity to sit at home playing video games. At least some got a (small) education or started a business. The issue with pensions as an example of UBI is that the only people getting them are old. So they mostly already have the assets they want, they don't have careers they want to improve, they don't want to start business or earn money, they want to retire...
nlitened 6y ago
They should have also collected monthly a total of $62500 extra “taxes” from all these people — the higher the income, the bigger the tax share.
- notahacker 6y ago
  tbf since their targeting was low income neighbourhoods, one can assume the higher income neighbourhoods would have contributed some of the share. A fair experiment would have at least stripped away all the other state funded benefits UBI supposedly replaces, but I guess 'UBI is good for the spending power of single-income couples but leaves the poorest people much worse off' wasn't the headline the advocacy group was shooting for...
- moduspol 6y ago
  Why $62500? The participants should be voting on how much to take from those among them with the higher incomes. I mean--unless we're assessing how UBI might work in a country without democracy.
  - AdrianB1 6y ago
    Democracy is not a free pas to vote anything, especially if it is negatively impact some people, otherwise you justify gang rapes as a majority decision.
    - moduspol 6y ago
      Sure, but it's tough to imagine in today's climate that a majority of voters living only on UBI would vote to maintain or lower the amount of money given directly to them from the top X%. We already have the issue today but it's not quite so direct.
      - AdrianB1 6y ago
        This is a huge problem with UBI. Maybe people will have to make a choice, either live on UBI or vote, but not both - it is immoral to vote for your own benefits.
Toutouxc 6y ago
Also what kind of effect on pricing it would have. Surely if everyone's baseline income increases, it creates a safe buffer-of-a-sort that necessities' prices (housing, food) can comfortably consume.
- aptwebapps 6y ago
  Wouldn't the naive expectation be that prices would rise somewhat but that if the markets in question were competitive that this would not be severe?
  - harry8 6y ago
    I direct your attention to the market for "housing"
    - aptwebapps 6y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23857621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23857621 gets at what I was thinking but was too lazy to articulate.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - mdorazio 6y ago
      Housing prices are barely correlated with incomes in a meaningful way across cities, let alone caused by them. See [1]. The #1 determinant of housing prices is supply, which is usually an issue of regulation, not of local ability to pay rent/mortgage. There's not much consensus on this topic among economists since there are so many confounding factors - the best paper I've seen so far is [2] which finds that income increases via minimum wage hikes might increase rents anywhere from a quarter to a half of the wage increase, absent other factors. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/07/heres-the-share-of-income-that-goes-to-rent-in-cities-across-the-us.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/07/heres-the-share-of-income-th... [2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3282661 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3282661
kingkawn 6y ago
One step at a time to open peoples’ minds
roenxi 6y ago
> They did not seem to research at all how to actually fund it And this is really the most profound part. There isn't an argument to be made against "if people have more money to buy stuff they will be better off". Nobody can argue against that, it is true. The _entire_ case against that sort of social spending is "but we need normal people to create more than they consume or the resources won't be available" and "this isn't fair on the people who have to support them" argued at varying levels of complexity and indirection. If you ignore the negative outcomes then any plan is a good plan and only has positive outcomes. Duh.
- lukevp 6y ago
  I disagree, it’s not the fairness, or the overproduction, but the best overall benefit to society given the money spent. Social programs that already exist are a progressive tax that penalizes healthy, working people more than those who are receiving the benefit. Examples: unemployment, Medicaid, WIC, Saver’s Credit.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- danaris 6y ago
  The level of productivity per capita in the economy today is vastly more than enough to supply our entire population with only a fraction working. There's also plenty of information indicating that if given the choice, most people actually want to work...they just don't want to be working shit jobs for shit pay for shit bosses.
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    Amen, how many times to we need to tell people, look production and consumption first, and then think about finance? I'm not saying finance is all bad, I'm saying when the financial situation is harder to understand than the so-called "real economy"...don't!
- DonaldFisk 6y ago
enaaem 6y ago
I don't see the point of these small studies at all. Many people already have some form of UBI like pensioners. That their lives are pretty relaxed should come as no surprise. The most important thing to study is the effect of UBI on total economy. Saudi Arabia is an interesting example, since their economy pretty much runs on free oil money. Saudi nationals are notorious for having bad work ethics, and they have to import many foreign workers to run the economy. To prepare the country for a post oil world companies are now required to hire a minimum percentage of Saudi nationals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudization
- larrydag 6y ago
  This is one of the macroeconomic scenarios that scares me the most. I can't imagine what would happen to the global socio-economic stability if those middle east countries were to lose that source of GDP. It's not to unreasonable to conceive either as more countries are becoming oil energy independent.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > what would happen to the global socio-economic stability if those middle east countries were to lose that source of GDP Tumultuous transition period followed by quiet. The same wealth that currently placates them also enables them to project power. And when the wealth disappears, infighting is more likely than outward violence. After the initial period of reorganisation, it will settle into a state similar to other formerly-wealth now-impoverished nations.
    - Ericson2314 6y ago
      Yeah, the extreme contrast between the countries that have and don't have oil in the middle east is what creates the conflict.
  - neutronicus 6y ago
    If the rest of the world is oil-independent, I imagine it will truck on regardless of any post-oil chaos in the former oil-producing regions.
GhostVII 6y ago
Another question I never see answered is if people are better off on UBI instead of welfare/food stamps/etc. Most of the time I hear people talking about finding UBI, they say it will replace existing social programs, but no UBI experiment that I have seen actually tests if people are better off with cash instead of social assistance.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  That’s a great point. Social services are about more than cash. We give mothers baby formula because we want babies to have adequate nutrition. If you hand out cash, some percentage of people will buy beer instead.
  - controversy 6y ago
    This is a valid point. I’ve never seen a response to how you make sure the spending goes to the resources. While one can argue that the people should be adults, reality shows that is not true. Having the infrastructure to pay rent automatically by the government means rent is paid. What do we do when people piss away their UBI and don’t have money for the necessities?
    - DonaldFisk 6y ago
      Anyone who intentionally did that would soon find themselves without accommodation or food. If it's because they can't budget, it could be paid to them weekly or even daily. People who can't manage their own lives (e.g. mentally ill, drug addicts) would need to be given help, whatever safety net there is.
      - controversy 6y ago
        The point of UBI is to remove non-private charity support. How will politicians react when people are dying in the streets? The US is not about persons responsiblity.
      - Spooky23 6y ago
DonaldFisk 6y ago
How do you propose that UBI be tested? If you give it to a small number of people, or to everyone for a limited time, it's argued it isn't UBI. Various services are funded out of taxation at present. The higher gross tax rate would be offset by UBI (those in work would get it too), so the mean net tax rate shouldn't change much. What would happen to the government employees currently working in social welfare if they'd lose their job is that they'd get UBI until they were given or found more productive work.
ElFitz 6y ago
There has been an accidental larger study: https://www.wired.com/story/free-money-the-surprising-effects-of-a-basic-income-supplied-by-government/ https://www.wired.com/story/free-money-the-surprising-effect...

jakeogh 6y ago

Hey, don't worry; we are just taxing the negative externalities of your existence. This is an authoritarian dream, and it's why cash has a big target on it. Got a fine? Deduct it. Putting people on the take gives government significantly more leverage over them. Next up is to incrementally pair it with a social credit score. The concept is fundamentally against free expression; it's the same old model used keep large fractions of social classes from becoming independent. Real solutions involve decentralization and less tax on _time_, the power players want cheap labor, so they were allowed to import it. That scam is well known now, so onto plan B. This is really a proposal for extreme centralization via hidden tax on value producers. It's a deliberate problem; hence the Hegel soluton.

perfunctory 6y ago
> Next up is to incrementally pair it with a social credit score Which part of “unconditional” do you not understand?
- HPsquared 6y ago
  Policies have a habit of changing over time.
  - perfunctory 6y ago
    By this logic we should never ever make any new policies lest they evolve into something undesirable.
    - mamon 6y ago
      I think all libertanians would agree with that logic :) In theory you should be able to come up with some minimal necessary set of laws and policies, pass apropriate parlimentary bills once, and after that parliament becomes unncecessary, or maybe it just gathers in session once a year, to evaluate the need for new laws. Also, to encourage long-term thinking it should be written into Constitution that any new law passed can only take effect 10 years after it was passed, not sooner.

Proven 6y ago

This would be funny if it wasn't sad (the ignorance of the Marxists who made this happen and the writer). Who's going to work (or, why would anyone work) and pay for BI if they can get by on BI and a bit of undeclared work on the side? Next article in the series: the promising results of city-wide looting (people found to be better off, store owners made whole by the rich insurance companies - eff yeah!)

mchusma 6y ago

I think UBI is an essential concept and believe will be no way around it in some fashion. That said, "AB testing" it is really hard. The real idea behind UBI (for most advocates) is that it is a living wage granted for a very long time (something like lifetimes). $500/mo for a few months or years means that people need to still plan around that loss of income, and are unlikely to act too differently. I like research, but I don't really see much benefit here. I think you justify UBI on these grounds: 1) administration costs are much higher for welfare states than UBI (the US spends more on anti poverty programs than it would take to distribute funds and make nobody below the US poverty line). This should appeal to fiscal conservatives. Our anti poverty programs have failed not due to resources, but rather due to centralized, command and control techniques a la ISSUE. 2) the number of people that are completely unemployable (they are not able to outcompete machines/AI at any narrow job function) will increase. Number (2) is more speculative for most people, but having automated away many jobs myself, I can see that the only reason things are not more automated is the will of leaders to automate. Most people lack the will, but that won't stop it in the long run, only slow it.

notahacker 6y ago
The big problem with (1) is that it's unambiguously falsified by widely available data. Approximately 75 million working age US citizens are 'economically inactive' in normal times - i.e. they're not working or paying income/payroll taxes, and in most cases are ineligible for any other type of benefit. The US poverty line is 12k. You're not finding all that extra money from admin costs

debacle 6y ago

This isn't a basic income experiment. It's a grant-based income subsidy. What a real basic income experiment would look like: - Take a nominally populated county. - Calculate a baseline income requirement necessary to live in the county. - Completely gut all of the economic service programs (carefully without breaking federal law). - Pool all that extra money together and divide it by the population. - Add some sort of VAT to county sales to cover the difference between what UBI should be and how much money is in the kitty. - Do a test run of at least 18-24 months. Things to pay attention to: - County sales tax receipts. - School attendance. - Employment, especially seasonal employment. - Crime. - Costs of groceries, restaurants, contractor services, etc. - Mean age of retirement. - Employment of those 18-25. - Rent prices Things to consider: - Are state pensions on the chopping block? - Are you going to implement basic income as UBI + earned income or the greater of the two? - Is there any opportunity to debit federally mandated economic support from the UBI totals? Hurdles: - Without buy in at the state level, how are you going to prevent people from buying their groceries across county lines, or doing most of their retail online? - Unless you pick the county properly (a proper mix of employment + age demographics), you'll have large problems on your hand. - Serious local, national, and possibly international pressure to derail the program.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
That's certainly one way to do it. Maybe the best way. But there's all sorts of things to study, and it may be valuable to try and study them in isolation.
- debacle 6y ago
  The psychological and resultant behavioral impact on tax base whales and the liquidity of labor are the most important things to study. I can't reasonably think of a means to study those outside of an academic scenario.
amanaplanacanal 6y ago
I know that where I live, state pensions can’t be touched, as the state Supreme Court has determined they are owned by the employees, not by the state.

amINeolib 6y ago

Not real UBI. I want to see an end to food stamps and housing subsidies and Medicare taxes before you call it UBI.

christiansakai 6y ago

I am concerned that UBI as a whole will make the divorce between economy and productivity, just like artificial pumping by the government divorces stock market from the economy. An individual will have this illusion of they are fine in life, as long as UBI coming in, even though they are not productive at all. Stability of a government is never guaranteed. What if one day, for whatever reason, whether the government go rogue, or the government has no more money or assets, decide to stop UBI. A lot of people will suddenly be unprepared to come to terms with the actual reality, that they don't have the needed marketable skills to survive in the world because they have been living off UBI all these times without cultivating themselves.

leoedin 6y ago
That's only the case if most people are happy sitting back and living off UBI. That's not a given. I've known people who inherited reasonable sums of money - enough to live a frugal life for a decade or so. None of them have quit their jobs and lived frugally for a decade. What that money has allowed is security. It's allowed them to take career risks, or go back to university and retrain. That's obviously anecdotal - my network skews educated and career driven to start with. It would be interesting to know how many people would just sit back and do nothing. It would also be interesting to know how inflationary the effect of everyone having that UBI would be - so much of the value of money comes from its relative scarcity, so maybe we'd find that if everyone has a basic income then the threshold for security just goes up. I'm not sure how we'd establish that without trying it though.
ksdale 6y ago
I agree with you completely that it's a problem when society as a whole doesn't have a good idea of what it means to be "productive" but I think that in your second sentence, you could just as easily replace "UBI" with "wages" and the truthfulness of it doesn't change at all. I think working for wages doesn't allow most people to do what I would consider "cultivating themselves," and possessing "marketable" skills is not the same thing as possessing useful skills. Obviously we all have our own definitions of "productive" (I actually like to think of it more as useful rather than profitable) but my own personal opinion is that what is useful and what people get paid for have as little overlap as they've ever had, so the risk of replacing certain jobs with UBI isn't actually as much of a threat to productivity as it might seem like.

steve76 6y ago

Destroy people with the ugliest and dirtiest tricks imaginable. Then pay them off to stop a civil revolt or mass die off. How about you just stop being mean to people? Walk away, give back instead of chasing endless celebrity? If you want to be Mother Theresa, first join a nunnery. This is battle royal, a free for all on the Serenghetti. You're not fooling anyone. Let's say a human traffic victim shows up with a fake ID. You have to pay a check, right? Some killer shows up on payday and beats her up, along with a hundred others, and sends the money back to Haiti or the Philippines to smuggle in nerve gas or fentanyl. Not only does that happen, that's the norm not the exception. Go live in the real world please. See what people really are like. You don't want to do the right thing. You don't want to make things better. You don't want to even have a good time. You want power, and be the only one who has power. You will do anything because once you stop, you have to be accountable to all your past crimes. Easiest way to win an election? Push out voters with high standards that make you work. Bring in voters with no standards who vote because they are told.

throw51319 6y ago

Are a lot of people going to use the UBI to better themselves? A large number will probably end up hanging out. Or work a few years to save for a downpayment, then end up hanging out. It will prob speed up automation. Like some 40 year old with no skills is gonna suddenly re-skill and being a computer programmer? Lol. Just gonna be a bunch of people chilling on the taxpayers dime. Reproducing, taking up space, etc. Everything is going to be a sharp bimodal distribution. Those that are productive, get paid a ton. Those who aren't productive and just chill all day on UBI.