5 ms·

Universal basic income doesn’t impact worker productivity

reilly3000 6y ago
Perhaps it would at $10K USD/mo, but at truly basic levels it’s often a productivity boost to allow people to not spend their free time doing things they could easily outsource. It’s expensive to be poor.
theli0nheart 6y ago
Printing this headline is downright irresponsible given the study population: > Researchers recruited 900 individuals to take part in the experiment, 59% of whom were female and 98% of whom were university students.
- avindroth 6y ago
  Woah yeah. That skews things drastically.
- tenpies 6y ago
  I was expecting the clickbait to have the classic flaws, small sample size, participants knowing it was a limited-time experiment, and other actors in the economy not being on UBI. This study is so comically limited that they didn't get to those classic flaws.
- Frost1x 6y ago
  When I worked with a university partnered research lab, it wasn't uncommon to have a heavily biased sample based on the university student population. The students were significantly easier to tap into and often cheaper if compensation was involved. With that said, if there's an IRB process for any sort of human subject work, it's always skirting along the ethically grey area to do this. So, not only is your data biased towards a specific subpopulation (concentrated age groups, often concentrated socioeconomic statuses, etc.), faculty are often on the verge of unethical conduct with students. 98% is pretty high even for the cheapest of faculty I interacted with.
f430 6y ago
the whole "nobody is gonna work with UBI" was started by people who benefit from this endless exploitation of serfdom.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
hartator 6y ago
I really don’t get the excitement about UBI. The US is not that rich of a country. Giving everyone $1,000 per month will cost $39t per year. US gpd is $21t per year. Maybe 50 or 100 years with some quantum leap in AI or something in likes. [My bad my math here is bad. Should be $3.9t not $39t. My initial point stands though. It's just too much money.]
- hexane360 6y ago
  Your math is off by a factor of 10. Giving 330 million people $12k/yr is only $4 trillion/yr.
- woopwoop 6y ago
  Double-check your arithmetic.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mmoskal 6y ago
  $3.9t not $39t. Think about it, US GDP can't be less than $1k per person per month.
- prashantv 6y ago
  Should that be 3.9T per year? (330,000,000121000)
- kalenx 6y ago
  I'm probably missing something, but 12,000$ * 328 millions = 3.9 T$, not 39?
- markdown 6y ago
  That money gets spent and comes back as tax revenue. If you think UBI is expensive, wait until you find out how expensive it will be to have a hundred million unemployed (as a result of automation for one). You give people money, they spend it on goods created by robots which are taxed, earning money to hand out to everyone as a dividend for being an owner in the national enterprise.
umeshunni 6y ago
If there's one thing Covid related shutdowns have shown, it's that vast numbers of people, in not very productive jobs, could be unemployed with minimal economic impact. Unemployment and labor (non-)participation rates have risen drastically, sometimes by 10s of percentage points, but overall GDP has dropped by only 5-8% in the most impacted countries, including the US and EU.
- megous 6y ago
  Unemployed people have economic impact, obviously. They consume their savings, increase debt, or are a tax burden on others (or all of the above). If they consume savings mainly, they may even show up as a positive influence on GDP. But it's not very sustainable, because for most people's savings are quite limited, and consuming them because they're forced to by circumstances is not really good for them.
megiddo 6y ago
This whole academic branch is the included the reproducibility project. Papers sit at about flip of a coin repeatability. In either case, if there's no change in net productivity, why spend the money to do it?
- me_me_me 6y ago
  If we are to assume hypothesis that the headline is correct. There are multiple benefits and insights that can be drawn. 1. People on UBI are not just going to take money stop working. This is one of the biggest counter argument for UBI - people are lazy and be drain on society. 2. People are still productive and if given UBI they have space to take risk and become entrepreneurs. A lot of people might have a idea/dream to start a business but due to mortgage, low income etc they cannot risk the well being of their families. 3. If UBI doesn't reduce productivity then you are injecting money into local economies via local people. This is literally supporting businesses that local people want to have around. 4. The whole social welfare department can be largely disbanded. 5. There was some crazy percentage of people that has no more then $1000 in account (left then month of spending). UBI would help people cope with emergencies. There is known effect of people in crisis falling into a hole due to the fight or flight mechanism. They literally cannot think straight and are being preyed upon by quick payday loan vulchers. 6. Jobs that are awful will have to be paid more to be done. I am not sure if thats good or bad. Depends who you are. 7. Young people would not be rushed to find job, or be fast track into school-uni-work thread. It would give people chance to find out what they like to do in life rather than roll dice and be stuck in career they don't like. Personally i believe you should have a few year gap between high school and university to get a taste for the different jobs. Hows that for a list?
SubiculumCode 6y ago
What is expensive is having to live on a financial cliff where even responsible actors occasionally fall off, devastating their productivity for years as they re-establish themselves, and for those that do suffer from other destabilizing conditions, they may never recover to become productive once again. If a financial disaster hits when you have children, those children will suffer its consequences, perhaps for decades, further inhibiting productivity. It is my strong opinion that a basic income stabilizes a productive population that will likely enjoy generational compounding of the basic income investment.
ntsplnkv2 6y ago
Why should it matter if it impacts worker productivity? The whole point is that as more jobs are automated people work less and can still live.
- SubiculumCode 6y ago
  a common argument against UBI is 'They'll just become lazy bums.'
heterodoxxed 6y ago
This isn't a surprising outcome but it goes against a commonly used argument against everything from a UBI to a social safety net to a cooperative society. People want to work, they want to produce and they want to feel accomplished. If our economy's only hope relies on threatening a large class of people with homelessness, destitution, starvation and even death unless they work, then our economy is immoral at its core.
- e40 6y ago
  Not to mention the threat of becoming ill bankrupting us. Even someone who has saved a goodly sum can lose it all if the insurance they have purchased taps out.
- throwayayay3883 6y ago
  "He who does not work shall not eat." ~a capitalist, presumably.
offby37years 6y ago
UBI is a death sentence within direct democracies short of robot/AI provided abundance. Introduction beforehand sows the seed for a direct transfer of wealth from the 49% haves to the 51% have-nots.
- SubiculumCode 6y ago
  You state this as fact when it is clearly an opinion about what would happen with a UBI. Moreover, if UBI was implemented as a tax refund, then there is plenty of precedent for not being alarmed.
- gumby 6y ago
  > Introduction beforehand sows the seed for a direct transfer of wealth from the 49% haves to the 51% have-nots. And why is that inherently bad? It may be bad (I happen not to think so) but would like more than a bare assertion that that is the case. For example, in favor: from an economics PoV, increased liquidity and discretionary income on the part of the poorer population should increase economic activity (e.g. velocity of money) which is good for business.
  - offby37years 6y ago
    It simultaneously incentivises skilled emigration and unskilled immigration. It would drive an exodus of any entrepreneurial talent.
    - gumby 6y ago
      > It would drive an exodus of any entrepreneurial talent. Why?
      - therealdrag0 6y ago
        Depends how much the transfer is. It sound like the implication is a lot. In which case entrepreneurs will move to where their potential returns aren’t dampened. Same reason people have moved TO silicone valley, ambitions of outsized rewards..
cs702 6y ago
...at least in the short run. And in the long run, to paraphrase Keynes, we're all dead anyway, so we might as well try it in more places and with more groups of people who seem "stuck" in poverty, and measure the results.
BurningFrog 6y ago
Not even "One study suggests..." in the title! This was highly artificial experiment with college students who "were asked to work on a set of tasks and were paid based on their performance".
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
I've heard multiple peers worry about runaway inflation if UBI were enacted.
gedy 6y ago
I'm old enough to see the difference that lower apartment rents and health insurance cost made in people's lives. One used to be able to live in places like coastal California on retail/etc jobs without needing a college degree. I'm not against UBI but feel like that is just trying to fix a symptom (in the USA at least).
nemo44x 6y ago
I like UBI from an efficiency perspective in that you would assume we could eliminate much of the overhead associated with social offices. However there is something about being put on an allowance that bothers me. It’s rather infantilizing and I wonder about the politics of it. I could see a party using it to buy votes - “elect us and you’ll get more money each month.”. It wound do wonders for the drug and alcohol industries, casinos, and state lotteries though. How many boys would never leave their moms basement? If anything it’s a huge risk to the USD remaining a global reserve currency. Why would non-Americans take it seriously when it’s passed out to millions of people every month?
- akvadrako 6y ago
  The alternatives to UBI are either no welfare, which creates many problems, or what we have now, means tested welfare. Surely it's more infantilising that instead of an allowance you have the government provide some of your food and housing while checking up on you to make sure you are not cheating.
  - nemo44x 6y ago
    Well I think the main idea behind welfare and EBT is that it isn’t supposed to be a lifestyle. It’s supposed to be something that helps a person during tough times until they can become independent. I do agree that UBI simplifies the entire thing. I’m just suspicious of the potential consequences.
alphabettsy 6y ago
I can tell quite a few people here didn’t read the article. The study was comically insufficient to support the headline.

Perhaps it would at $10K USD/mo, but at truly basic levels it’s often a productivity boost to allow people to not spend their free time doing things they could easily outsource. It’s expensive to be poor.

theli0nheart 6y ago

Printing this headline is downright irresponsible given the study population: > Researchers recruited 900 individuals to take part in the experiment, 59% of whom were female and 98% of whom were university students.

avindroth 6y ago
Woah yeah. That skews things drastically.
tenpies 6y ago
I was expecting the clickbait to have the classic flaws, small sample size, participants knowing it was a limited-time experiment, and other actors in the economy not being on UBI. This study is so comically limited that they didn't get to those classic flaws.
Frost1x 6y ago
When I worked with a university partnered research lab, it wasn't uncommon to have a heavily biased sample based on the university student population. The students were significantly easier to tap into and often cheaper if compensation was involved. With that said, if there's an IRB process for any sort of human subject work, it's always skirting along the ethically grey area to do this. So, not only is your data biased towards a specific subpopulation (concentrated age groups, often concentrated socioeconomic statuses, etc.), faculty are often on the verge of unethical conduct with students. 98% is pretty high even for the cheapest of faculty I interacted with.

f430 6y ago

the whole "nobody is gonna work with UBI" was started by people who benefit from this endless exploitation of serfdom.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

hartator 6y ago

I really don’t get the excitement about UBI. The US is not that rich of a country. Giving everyone $1,000 per month will cost $39t per year. US gpd is $21t per year. Maybe 50 or 100 years with some quantum leap in AI or something in likes. [My bad my math here is bad. Should be $3.9t not $39t. My initial point stands though. It's just too much money.]

hexane360 6y ago
Your math is off by a factor of 10. Giving 330 million people $12k/yr is only $4 trillion/yr.
woopwoop 6y ago
Double-check your arithmetic.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mmoskal 6y ago
$3.9t not $39t. Think about it, US GDP can't be less than $1k per person per month.
prashantv 6y ago
Should that be 3.9T per year? (330,000,000121000)
kalenx 6y ago
I'm probably missing something, but 12,000$ * 328 millions = 3.9 T$, not 39?
markdown 6y ago
That money gets spent and comes back as tax revenue. If you think UBI is expensive, wait until you find out how expensive it will be to have a hundred million unemployed (as a result of automation for one). You give people money, they spend it on goods created by robots which are taxed, earning money to hand out to everyone as a dividend for being an owner in the national enterprise.

umeshunni 6y ago

If there's one thing Covid related shutdowns have shown, it's that vast numbers of people, in not very productive jobs, could be unemployed with minimal economic impact. Unemployment and labor (non-)participation rates have risen drastically, sometimes by 10s of percentage points, but overall GDP has dropped by only 5-8% in the most impacted countries, including the US and EU.

megous 6y ago
Unemployed people have economic impact, obviously. They consume their savings, increase debt, or are a tax burden on others (or all of the above). If they consume savings mainly, they may even show up as a positive influence on GDP. But it's not very sustainable, because for most people's savings are quite limited, and consuming them because they're forced to by circumstances is not really good for them.

megiddo 6y ago

This whole academic branch is the included the reproducibility project. Papers sit at about flip of a coin repeatability. In either case, if there's no change in net productivity, why spend the money to do it?

me_me_me 6y ago
If we are to assume hypothesis that the headline is correct. There are multiple benefits and insights that can be drawn. 1. People on UBI are not just going to take money stop working. This is one of the biggest counter argument for UBI - people are lazy and be drain on society. 2. People are still productive and if given UBI they have space to take risk and become entrepreneurs. A lot of people might have a idea/dream to start a business but due to mortgage, low income etc they cannot risk the well being of their families. 3. If UBI doesn't reduce productivity then you are injecting money into local economies via local people. This is literally supporting businesses that local people want to have around. 4. The whole social welfare department can be largely disbanded. 5. There was some crazy percentage of people that has no more then $1000 in account (left then month of spending). UBI would help people cope with emergencies. There is known effect of people in crisis falling into a hole due to the fight or flight mechanism. They literally cannot think straight and are being preyed upon by quick payday loan vulchers. 6. Jobs that are awful will have to be paid more to be done. I am not sure if thats good or bad. Depends who you are. 7. Young people would not be rushed to find job, or be fast track into school-uni-work thread. It would give people chance to find out what they like to do in life rather than roll dice and be stuck in career they don't like. Personally i believe you should have a few year gap between high school and university to get a taste for the different jobs. Hows that for a list?

SubiculumCode 6y ago

What is expensive is having to live on a financial cliff where even responsible actors occasionally fall off, devastating their productivity for years as they re-establish themselves, and for those that do suffer from other destabilizing conditions, they may never recover to become productive once again. If a financial disaster hits when you have children, those children will suffer its consequences, perhaps for decades, further inhibiting productivity. It is my strong opinion that a basic income stabilizes a productive population that will likely enjoy generational compounding of the basic income investment.

ntsplnkv2 6y ago

Why should it matter if it impacts worker productivity? The whole point is that as more jobs are automated people work less and can still live.

SubiculumCode 6y ago
a common argument against UBI is 'They'll just become lazy bums.'

heterodoxxed 6y ago

This isn't a surprising outcome but it goes against a commonly used argument against everything from a UBI to a social safety net to a cooperative society. People want to work, they want to produce and they want to feel accomplished. If our economy's only hope relies on threatening a large class of people with homelessness, destitution, starvation and even death unless they work, then our economy is immoral at its core.

e40 6y ago
Not to mention the threat of becoming ill bankrupting us. Even someone who has saved a goodly sum can lose it all if the insurance they have purchased taps out.
throwayayay3883 6y ago
"He who does not work shall not eat." ~a capitalist, presumably.

offby37years 6y ago

UBI is a death sentence within direct democracies short of robot/AI provided abundance. Introduction beforehand sows the seed for a direct transfer of wealth from the 49% haves to the 51% have-nots.

SubiculumCode 6y ago
You state this as fact when it is clearly an opinion about what would happen with a UBI. Moreover, if UBI was implemented as a tax refund, then there is plenty of precedent for not being alarmed.
gumby 6y ago
> Introduction beforehand sows the seed for a direct transfer of wealth from the 49% haves to the 51% have-nots. And why is that inherently bad? It may be bad (I happen not to think so) but would like more than a bare assertion that that is the case. For example, in favor: from an economics PoV, increased liquidity and discretionary income on the part of the poorer population should increase economic activity (e.g. velocity of money) which is good for business.
- offby37years 6y ago
  It simultaneously incentivises skilled emigration and unskilled immigration. It would drive an exodus of any entrepreneurial talent.
  - gumby 6y ago
    > It would drive an exodus of any entrepreneurial talent. Why?
    - therealdrag0 6y ago
      Depends how much the transfer is. It sound like the implication is a lot. In which case entrepreneurs will move to where their potential returns aren’t dampened. Same reason people have moved TO silicone valley, ambitions of outsized rewards..

cs702 6y ago

...at least in the short run. And in the long run, to paraphrase Keynes, we're all dead anyway, so we might as well try it in more places and with more groups of people who seem "stuck" in poverty, and measure the results.

BurningFrog 6y ago

Not even "One study suggests..." in the title! This was highly artificial experiment with college students who "were asked to work on a set of tasks and were paid based on their performance".

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

I've heard multiple peers worry about runaway inflation if UBI were enacted.

gedy 6y ago

I'm old enough to see the difference that lower apartment rents and health insurance cost made in people's lives. One used to be able to live in places like coastal California on retail/etc jobs without needing a college degree. I'm not against UBI but feel like that is just trying to fix a symptom (in the USA at least).

nemo44x 6y ago

I like UBI from an efficiency perspective in that you would assume we could eliminate much of the overhead associated with social offices. However there is something about being put on an allowance that bothers me. It’s rather infantilizing and I wonder about the politics of it. I could see a party using it to buy votes - “elect us and you’ll get more money each month.”. It wound do wonders for the drug and alcohol industries, casinos, and state lotteries though. How many boys would never leave their moms basement? If anything it’s a huge risk to the USD remaining a global reserve currency. Why would non-Americans take it seriously when it’s passed out to millions of people every month?

akvadrako 6y ago
The alternatives to UBI are either no welfare, which creates many problems, or what we have now, means tested welfare. Surely it's more infantilising that instead of an allowance you have the government provide some of your food and housing while checking up on you to make sure you are not cheating.
- nemo44x 6y ago
  Well I think the main idea behind welfare and EBT is that it isn’t supposed to be a lifestyle. It’s supposed to be something that helps a person during tough times until they can become independent. I do agree that UBI simplifies the entire thing. I’m just suspicious of the potential consequences.

alphabettsy 6y ago

I can tell quite a few people here didn’t read the article. The study was comically insufficient to support the headline.