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I can’t help but think that UBI would distort job markets. Let’s pick an example of a “sucky job” (and I say this as just an example, I realize these guys work

• perfmode 6y ago
  UBI frees people from economic coercion. poverty is like having a gun to your head. you do what you’ve gotta do. if salaries for essential, dirty jobs must go up, i am all for it.
  • ahelwer 6y ago
    No no you don't understand, people working of their own volition is distortion of the job market.
    • cheez 6y ago
      That sounds a lot like forced work!!!
  • bena 6y ago
    I kind of get that, but on the other hand, you could say "Existence is like having a gun to your head. You do what you've got to do." Because you need food and shelter to survive. There's been no point in time where we didn't have to acquire it. We're just now getting to the point where the production of it requires nominal effort. These are unprecedented times.
    • perfmode 6y ago
      yes yes all of existence is suffering. we’ve known this for thousands of years. the escape from suffering is wisdom and compassion. in this new abundance, why not remove all the guns from all the heads?
      • dantheman 6y ago
        I'm totally for that - make it voluntary. Or are we only going to point the gun at others to take what they have?
        • krapp 6y ago
          If we made it voluntary, almost no one would volunteer, certainly not enough to be viable. Taxation and the rule of law aren't opt-in for the same reason.
        • Talanes 6y ago
          I wasn't given a vote when we decided to hand out all of the land and resources to them in the first place, so I hardly see how the system as it stands is in any way voluntary.
          • dantheman 6y ago
            Do you think most wealth is from land? Is that who the UBI taxes would come from? Would it be funded by a property tax?
      • daseiner1 6y ago
        in modernity, many of the guns’ hands & heads have the same owner
      • garmaine 6y ago
        Because we are not living in an era of such abundance that we have the liberty to do that. Do the math: 300M people, $2k/mo, 12mo/yr is 7.2 trillion dollars. Even to first order that is unaffordable, and that’s without factoring in that UBI would decimate the tax base that’s supposed to support it, or the consumer price inflation that would result in that $2k not going as far as you’d expect.
  • motorcycleman9 6y ago
    To me, it seems like man's constant fight against the brutality of mother nature will never end. As long as we need food, need medicine, and entropy destroys what we create, we will need a lot of people working to solve problems. Any conception of basic income where we can freely give out $2000 a month to everyone has a net present value roughly equal to giving each person a lump sum payment of $500,000. There's not enough wealth in the world to sustain it.
    • ianai 6y ago
      Sure, give someone 500k and they might try to buy some luxury goods and inflate prices of various things. Give someone enough to not be destitute on a monthly basis and you’ll have a huge boon to the economy - because they’ll buy the essentials. People will always want more than just the basics and thus work.
    • darepublic 6y ago
      There is if we have robots
    • perfmode 6y ago
      man isn’t fighting the brutality of nature. man is struggling to overcome the brutality of man. nature is what we are. life is a beautiful struggle of a dance when we exist within that flow.
    • newen 6y ago
      American households own $98 trillion in net worth. Averages to about $340,000 per person. And this is just household wealth. So yes there is enough money out there.
      • leetcrew 6y ago
        the only wealth that isn't "household wealth" is public assets. I guess there might technically be enough to give everyone $500k (or $2000/month), but do you want the government to provide any services?
  • chii 6y ago
    > if salaries for essential, dirty jobs must go up, i am all for it so all goods and services that require said "dirty job" in the supply chain will go up in price. This eventually negates the UBI benefits, because the level of UBI no longer can sustain purchases of all the goods and services that it originally could due to the increases in prices. So do you increase UBI to counter this? Or do you let it be, and UBI no longer pays enough to maintain the same level of living standard. In which case, people are now once again, forced economically, to work "dirty jobs" despite not wanting it.
    • chottocharaii 6y ago
      > This eventually negates the UBI benefits Perhaps partially. But you have no evidence to support your implicit assertion that it happens totally, or that your argument defeats UBI on the merits
    • perfmode 6y ago
      a lot of assumptions made here. let me put it this way: if garbage person labor shortage is a blocker, i will personally sign up for 1 day per week garbage duty. if that’s the cost to pay for a more equitable society, why not leave the keyboard for a day and perform that noble and necessary duty. i’m sure i’m not the only person on HN who feels this way. the world isn’t all bad. it’s getting better. but it only gets better insofar as we ourselves become better. it is this striving towards higher harmony that propels us forward.
      • qudat 6y ago
        > if garbage person labor shortage is a blocker, i will personally sign up for 1 day per week garbage duty. No you won't
      • chii 6y ago
        so do you currently volunteer your time for social work (or any other work for which there is a shortage of people due to low pay and hard to perform)? Even if you _would_ do as you have proposed above, most people won't. A labour shortage is still likely the result, esp. if said labour is not high paying, but the doing of which is still relatively important to a functioning society. I'm not against UBI - i would want it, even if it means a higher tax! But i just don't see how it is implementable atm, and also whether there are any negative consequences. The unemployment benefits that have been paid out in the USA so far has many talking about how it is a disincentive to go back to work - because they are paid more than their original job. I can't see how this won't be the same under a UBI system - so the only way for a worker to _do_ work they wouldn't ordinarily do is to pay more!
• gniv 6y ago
  Or you just need to pay more for garbage disposal. In Zurich for example you pay per bag of garbage.
  • dwighttk 6y ago
    I have neighbors who barely get 90% of their garbage into their practically free trash cans. I’m exaggerating a bit, but still...
• kingbirdy 6y ago
  If I have to pay higher taxes but it means everyone is working in a job they love that seems like a worthwhile trade.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • hcurtiss 6y ago
    So, no garbage men?
    • krapp 6y ago
      It's up to the free market to make jobs attractive to labor. UBI means employers won't be able to press-gang workers into anything just because a job needs to be done or because people need to eat.
• crooked-v 6y ago
  > Now we have no garbage man and the wage would need to increase to find new people. To cover that, taxes go up. You're taking this as a given. Why? Remember that we are living in a time of record profits for many industries.
  • bluedevil2k 6y ago
    Of course taxes are going to go up...where’s this $2k a month coming from?
    • wtfareyouon 6y ago
      Taxing the top 5% more.
      • refurb 6y ago
        Top 5%? There aren’t enough of them. And the top 5% start at ~$150k per household. Not exactly “rich”. To fund it, you’d probably have to tax the top 50% at a much higher rate. Total US income is about 9,200T. Top 5% represent about 30% of all income or 3,000T. Pay every household $24,000 per year is about 3,000T total. So yeah, you could tax the top 5% at 100% and just barely pay for it.
        • boogies 6y ago
          This seems to be the case in Scandinavia with broad basic health care. In at least one country median earners pay 60% tax IIRC. https://files.taxfoundation.org/legacy/docs/Progressivity%20of%20Scandanavian%20and%20US%20Income%20Taxes.png https://files.taxfoundation.org/legacy/docs/Progressivity%20...
          • refurb 6y ago
            And that extends to far lower incomes than in the US. The 40% bracket in the UK starts at ~$60k USD (50k GBP). In the US you’d be in a 22% bracket up to $84k. Not picking on the UK, just an example.
• _jahh 6y ago
  maybe garbage disposal is more expensive because the firms do pay more so people now have a greater incentive to recycle and use less.
• teruakohatu 6y ago
  The argument against that is base wages may drop as business pay less because people can afford to take lower paying jobs, or as low as minimum wage allows. My country (NZ) pays most families a weekly amount based on how many kids they have and their household income (Technically it is a tax break and so only applies to people who earn money, but for most people it might as well be a payment). Some have claimed this has suppressed wages and is a subsidy to businesses from the government. Minimum wage rises counteracts this. I am not sure if this theory can be proven. Regardless I would expect a wage/price spiral causing inflation initially: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price/wage_spiral https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price/wage_spiral https://www.ird.govt.nz/topics/working-for-families/can-i-get-working-for-families https://www.ird.govt.nz/topics/working-for-families/can-i-ge...
• elil17 6y ago
  Or crappy jobs should have to pay more. Handling stinking garbage all day sounds like a job that should be high paying given how miserable it is. But due to desperation, people without other options are willing to accept very low amounts of money to do it. With UBI, the price of hiring a garbage collector would equal the price necessary to fairly compensate someone for having to pick up garbage.
  • gpanders 6y ago
    But that’s exactly what he’s saying. The crappy jobs will have to pay more in order to attract people, and in order to compensate for the increase in labor costs, the cost of garbage collection goes up. Basically, increased labor costs drives up cost of goods (inflation), which offsets the benefit of the UBI in the first place.
    • haroldG133 6y ago
      That’s not how inflation works.
  • function_seven 6y ago
    I pay about $25 a month for my garbage pickup. How much of that is to compensate the garbage man who spends about 30 seconds at my house? If he makes $20 an hour, then it's about 17 cents or so. Let's double his wage to account for benefits, employer-paid payroll taxes, workers' comp, etc. Hell, let's say the all-in labor cost for each garbage truck driver is $50/hour. That's still $0.42 I'm paying as my share of his time. Roughly $2 a month. Let's triple-ish that to account for the other personnel at the landfill and transfer stations. If my garbage bill goes up by another $5 each month, I'm way ahead with the UBI check. Unless you can find 399 other things in daily life where wage increases will wipe out the UBI. Of course a universal income will alter markets. Jobs that suck will have to pay more. That's a feature, not a bug. The alternative is that we enjoy low prices on ditches dug, because those doing the digging are desperate for the work. I'd rather live in a society that doesn't fight to preserve that dynamic.
    • 6y ago
• TrinaryWorksToo 6y ago
  Yeah, we don't need people to work. This will incentivize people to automate work where possible. The ideal world is everything is automated and EVERYONE benefits, vs what we have now: much is automated and the rich benefit while others have to work shit jobs or die.
  • refurb 6y ago
    Automate everything? Who builds and repairs the robots? And who gets stuck with that job when everyone else doesn’t have to work?
    • TrinaryWorksToo 6y ago
      If everything is automated, there would be no repair jobs as robots would self-repair.
      • refurb 6y ago
        Who repairs the self-repair robots when they need repair?
        • leetcrew 6y ago
          I'm as skeptical as you are, but presumably if we could make robots that were capable of repairing themselves, they could also repair other robots?
        • TrinaryWorksToo 6y ago
          They could repair themselves.
          • refurb 6y ago
            This is so distant in the future that it’s almost not worth the discussion. Maybe we can pick this up 100 years from now.
• jostylr 6y ago
  There may also be ways to rearrange the labor if insufficient people wan to step up. For example, there are places where garbage trucks lift trash cans to dump into them. If that is too difficult, one could setup dumpsters at the end of neighborhoods and have a truck that goes dumps that stuff into it. So more work for the individuals. Similarly, if there were not people to clean offices, then have the office workers do it (assuming there are offices, of course). For things that are really essential and cannot be done away with, the cost would go up. It seems reasonable to pay more for vital services. That may mean higher taxes or some other payment arrangement, but it is only regressive if the taxes are done in a regressive way. There may also be deflationary effects (namely eliminating the giant waste of BS jobs): https://medium.com/@austingmackell/the-deflationary-effects-of-a-basic-income-bf882c6c981 https://medium.com/@austingmackell/the-deflationary-effects-... A UBI would change the job market. But whether it is a distortion or fixing some externality cost that was distorting the market is certainly debatable.
• wtfareyouon 6y ago
  Made a throwaway because this comment and your other comments are just so wtf. It's like you are arguing that UBI will hurt poor people but thinly veiled with some boomer-nomics to make it sound legit. > Higher taxes are a regressive solution to giving people more money. There is a thing called progressive taxes. You can change the tax brackets. If you are in top x% you can have higher taxes that basically negate the UBI + more. Done. That is not regressive at all. Garbage and other dirty jobs should pay more. That might be taxes or it might be that those services need more automation, or a better pricing model. A UBI is a base. Will some people strive for nothing more in life and just live wherever they can afford to on this income? Yes. Thats okay. If there is more money, there will always be way more people who want to get ahead and get more.
  • bluedevil2k 6y ago
    I hardly think my comments are way out there at all, and would probably be agreed with by most Americans. I never made a comment that UBI would hurt poor people, merely distort the job market. (And be a man, stand by your comments and don’t make a throw away)
    • wtfareyouon 6y ago
      Honestly, I think they are. Americans have really weird beliefs and call anything that could benefit other people "socialism" but it seems fine when they hand out tax breaks to rich people. In terms of distorting the job market, well UBI might just force the free-market to accept that people deserve a dignified life and get out of poverty. Why should a garbage man not get 42k instead of 30k? I don't share political opinions publicly because that is just bad for business. I still stand by my views.
      • bluedevil2k 6y ago
        “Really weird beliefs” — attacking an entire country now?
  • dang 6y ago
    Trollish usernames aren't allowed on HN because they effectively troll every thread they post to. I've banned this one. Please don't create accounts to post in the flamewar style in any case. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20trollish%20username https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• frio 6y ago
  UBIs also have the capacity to expand the workforce. As I age, I find my social circle increasingly includes people who can't work a traditional 9-5 job -- whether that's temporary (caring for an ill family member, early parenthood, etc.) or permanent (illness, disability, harmed on the job). At least in New Zealand, those who can claim a benefit from the Government end up in a welfare trap, because we reduce welfare payments as you regain an income. There's no immediate financial benefit to you, the welfare recipient, in working 10-20 hours vs. not working at all. There's a whole philosophical discussion involved in whether those people should have to work, but rightly or wrongly, a lot of societal and personal value is derived from employment. A UBI deletes the welfare trap, and allows people who exist on the margins/are incapable of full-time work to find and immediately benefit from employment again. Maybe the garbagemen will need to be paid more, but we should also see more part-time workers put their hands up. A UBI would certainly change job markets; I'm not sure whether "distort" is the right word.
• repiret 6y ago
  Taxation is not necessarily regressive. Where I live, income tax accounts for almost all of the tax I pay, and income tax is very much progressive. But also where I live, the garbage man is not a public employee, but an employee of a private garbage company. So my taxes don't need to change, instead my garbage bill goes up. That would be regressive, since a garbage bill is a higher percentage of poor people's income. But some poor people just don't pay the garbage man, and instead take their garbage to the landfill themselves, which is way way cheaper. Incidentally, you can make the same argument about minimum wage increases - the cost of getting low wage work done increases, so prices increase. I don't want to get into an argument about the effectiveness of that, but the evidence generally suggests minimum wage works better than conservative naysayers sometimes claim.
• zuhayeer 6y ago
  It will definitely change job markets. I see driving for Uber as a "UBI" in the sense that it allows you to make money if you have a car and know how to drive (I know not everyone can front that money, point is just for illustration). Now what has happened to the broader labor market? Well, if you don't like your minimum wage job at present, you can always drive Uber (and at any time you want at that). That would make crappy jobs have higher wages (for the sacrifice in flexibility, intensity of labor, etc) and I think that's fine – it's just the market correcting for the alternatives people have to make money. I think actual UBI will help motivate us automate these mundane repetitive tasks in the long run that we currently employ humans for. Although there is still a lot to do, eventually people will have the choice to do repetitive, laborious work. Instead, they can focus higher level creative work everyday for something they enjoy.
  • Talanes 6y ago
    People who driver Uber for a living aren't duing it "anytime they want" though. They have to time their working hours to places and times of high demand to actually make money.
• unloco 6y ago
  Most Americans will take the UBI and do good things with it, not quit or change their job. It will boost the lower tiers up a notch and allow people to explore better options, ie Music Teacher, but that is nothing but beneficial. People that dont like heavy work shouldnt be doing it. It will give workers a bit more power of choice, but that isn't something to be scared of. There will always be workers to fill those jobs with good pay, no skill but they may rotate out more frequently. Blue collar workers -like me- normally find certain comfort in their jobs being outdoors, hard labor, and not contained to cubicle (or a room of kids lol).
  • skybrian 6y ago
    On the margin, some people will retire earlier or work less. Financial independence becomes feasible for more people at a younger age. These are the same choices you might make if you have money. That doesn't seem like a bad thing, and it would be pretty hypocritical for those of us who can do it to deny it to others. But it seems like there is some risk that young people who have never worked might not get in the habit of working? The ambitious will want more than just to barely get by, but I don't think we can entirely rule out a slacker lifestyle becoming popular. I think we should still try it and see, but the plan might need to be adjusted.
• adamnemecek 6y ago
  Or it would force people to rethink garbage collection.
• lifeformed 6y ago
  Then the garbage job would start paying $66k a year.
  • bob33212 6y ago
    The problem is that we don't know how many people have no interest in working at all at any salary. Some people would choose to not work than to get paid 62k a year at a job they hate. People who oppose UBI are afraid that no one will fill jobs that they think are essential.
    • yelloweyes 6y ago
      UBI is not about "not working". It's about "here's some basic money so you don't have to worry every day about starving to death". Want to wear clean clothes everyday and drive a car? You're gonna have to work.
      • brosirmandude 6y ago
        This is the point right here. Every reaction to UBI discussions immediately assume UBI is trying to replace all income, which is very much not the idea. It's a floor for society.
        • bob33212 6y ago
          We currently have a floor (SNAP and food stamps, food banks, and soup kitchens, homeless shelters). UBI is about more than not starving.
          • lifeformed 6y ago
            Those floors are still pretty low as they don't cover housing. UBI is like, a food, shelter, and health floor.
            • bob33212 6y ago
• bernawil 6y ago
  Now a garbage man says “I’m not gonna be a garbage man anymore, I can do something I love now, like a music teacher that pays $30k” "wait it's gone to $25K... to $15K.. aand it's gone". Other people might have the same idea and if more people want to become music teachers, music teacher salaries go down and garbageman keeps picking garbage.
• aahhahahaaa 6y ago
  Having nearly unlimited free garbage removal is probably more than a problem than people realize. UBI means you can actually evaluate the system you live in and determine what's necessary (and then pay more for it). At the moment it's all "jobs jobs jobs" - we have entire federal agencies that are essentially jobs programs (Homeland Security is a great example... they've done almost literally nothing).
• ironman1478 6y ago
  If those jobs are so critical those people should be paid more. If UBI is how it's done, then so be it.
• 3131s 6y ago
  This is the whole point of a UBI actually. The garbage companies would have to pay more, but the result would be that instead of no garbage man, the garbage man now just works 20 hours a week and takes more vacations. And because this vital job is no longer as "sucky", other people have joined the profession too and also put in 10-20 hours a week thereby distributing this type of hard physical labor across a larger pool of people.
• morpheuskafka 6y ago
  Or they have to improve the working conditions on those jobs. Garbage workers have been treated poorly for a long time, and so have meat-packing workers, and Amazon fulfillment workers, and other "sucky jobs." If those workers have access to UBI they will have significantly more bargaining power in the workplace and would be less beholden to their employers for daily lives.
• maxerickson 6y ago
  Yes, distorting job markets is one of the goals. For example, driving up wages for unpleasant jobs is a good thing.
• fiblye 6y ago
  Garbage men are working one of society's most important jobs. They're deserving of respect for the hard work they do. If UBI results in underpaid people leaving, employers will have to raise wages to match the true value of the job or they'll invest in automation. Either way would be good.
  • mythrwy 6y ago
    I wonder how hard it would be to automate the garbage man job?
    • rtkwe 6y ago
      Pretty hard, have to solve self driving trucks first, there's already just 1 person on a truck operating the remote arm in places where roadside bins work (ie basically anywhere other than the urban core).
    • goatlover 6y ago
      Ever seen all the kinds of things people put out for the trash, and how dumpsters can be overflowing in various different lots? It won't be easy to automate.
• spyckie2 6y ago
  This is a good thing, not a bad thing. I would say it corrects job markets, turns them from slavery due to lack of options, into fair competitive markets on both supply and demand sides. It will not affect day to day life very much unless you've been underpaying for a vital service (in this case, you're the slave owner). Then all the slave owners will just have to pay more for services that they want.