5 ms·

Nobody has yet to explain the incentive for minimum paid workers to go to work once UBI payments becomes equal to a minimum paid job.

lexicality 5y ago
That's a very interesting way of phrasing that question. Do you think the fact that no one would want to do these jobs for minimum wage if they aren't being forced to by threat of poverty might suggest that we need to approach those jobs differently?
- cbmuser 5y ago
  > Do you think the fact that no one would want to do these jobs for minimum wage if they aren't being forced to by threat of poverty might suggest that we need to approach those jobs differently? So you want to pay your cleaning personnel the same wage as a heart surgeon? Don’t you think that such high wages will eventually just raise prices?
  - lexicality 5y ago
    Surely the point of the market is that you need to pay for things based on how difficult it is to get them? Contrived example. Say you have some toilets you want cleaning and you decide to offer the job for $5 an hour + tips from toilet goers. The only person that agrees to do it is some homeless dude. You're not very happy about this, but no one else showed up so you go with it. Then two weeks later the city offers $5/hr UBI and the homeless guy immediately quits. "But wait, if you were scrubbing the toilets you get $10/hr + tips!" you say to him, and he says "ok cool but I'd rather beg on the street" and walks out This means that $10/hr is actually significantly too low for cleaning toilets and the only reason this guy agreed to do it for $5/hr is he would have literally died otherwise You can say "hey, a guy scrubbing toilets should definitely not make more than me, a big important programmer! My job's way harder" but would you scrub toilets for your current salary? I don't think I'd want to. Equally my company could probably give me a 10% pay cut and I'd complain about it but keep doing my job. I like programming. However, the sad truth is society needs people to clean toilets and sweep the streets significantly more than it needs me to write React code for some website. If every cleaner in the world quit simultaneously, it'd be utter chaos. If every frontend dev in the world quit it'd be annoying but no one would die. So why do we pay cleaners so little?
    - chii 5y ago
      > So why do we pay cleaners so little? I'll counter with an example which might illustrate. If you were at a desert, and dying of thirst, you would pay absolutely anything for water. You would not pay anything for diamonds at all. But in normal circumstances, water is cheap, so cheap, that it's almost not metered. Diamonds, however, is still fairly expensive (even artificial ones). Why do we pay so little for water, when it's so essential? Why do we pay so much for diamonds, when it's basically useless cept for being shiny?
      - lexicality 5y ago
        > Why do we pay so little for water, when it's so essential? Because the government says water has to be cheap? There are quite a lot of places in the world where water is not cheap, but where I live there are laws that govern how much it can be sold for. There are certain things that people will pay literally anything for, such as water, food, healthcare etc because they'll die otherwise. Usually the government will step in and set a maximum price for these things to try and make sure people don't die because overall that's bad for the economy. No one's going to die from a dirty toilet though > Why do we pay so much for diamonds, when it's basically useless cept for being shiny? I read a really interesting article about the "diamonds are a girl's best friend" advertising campaign but I can't find it now. The summary is "because the people that own the diamond mines say they're worth it and everyone just goes along with the lie because it makes them feel nice"
  - Already__Taken 5y ago
    That's such a strawman as to be dishonest and bring bad faith to the discussion. _nobody_ but you is saying that. By the same logic if a heart surgeon for some reason wanted to drive an uber you think they are getting paid $1000+ now? Why would anything about this change? prices will fluctuate by supply and demand. I could buy 100$ bottles of wine but don't because that's dumb. If I had a million I still wouldn't.
cbmuser 5y ago
The incentive for such jobs will be higher wages which in return means higher prices which eventually compensates for the whole UBI in the first place. Money _cannot_ have any value if it’s not backed by any goods or labor. If your baker gets his UBI, why would he want to get up early and bake your bread in the first place when there is no incentive? Or why would anyone want to sell you anything when the money isn’t actually a „credit“ for any goods or labor. Money is just a convenient method for exchanging goods and labor. If you just give out money to anyone for free without exchanging it for labor, it eventually doesn’t have any value and people will find another currency or go back to exchange goods and labor directly.
- alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  > If your baker gets his UBI, why would he want to get up early and bake your bread in the first place when there is no incentive? This is why I'm asking. I actually know two bakers, and can guarantee that there's no way they would go to work if they had exactly what they were earning but didn't have to get up and go to work. Extending this out, no baker would consider working unless their pay was above and beyond UBI. And the only way to pay them more while having the same profits to the bakery owner would be to raise prices. This is a direct example of how UBI would definitely cause inflation.
nvoid 5y ago
I don't see anyone one here talking about this. It is already happening with the furlough scheme. Isn't that the experiment already run already? If the furlough scheme meant (some) people don't want to go back to work because they are already earning enough to live comfortably whilst doing nothing, then why would we want UBI? Another problem is the risk of inflation. If everyone in the country has a certain amount of money coming in then shop-keepers are just going to raise their prices. Why wouldn't they? After a few years of this, we are back to square one and the only solution would be to keep raising the UBI.
- Turing_Machine 5y ago
  > If the furlough scheme meant (some) people don't want to go back to work because they are already earning enough to live comfortably whilst doing nothing, then why would we want UBI? The situations are not the same. At all. With the current setup, the options are 1) don't work and receive $x, or 2) work and receive $x. With UBI, the options would be 1) don't work and receive $x, or 2) work and receive $2x. Would some people rather not work and get $x than work and get $2x? Certainly. But not all of them would. Not even close. I'm not necessarily advocating for UBI, but your presentation of the situation is not accurate.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  The furlough scheme is conceptually very different as the furlough system explicitly disincentivises going back to work as you lose the furlough money if you do so.
rodiger 5y ago
You don't lose UBI by working. UBI should be intended to be the lowest possible amount of money to live. Life won't be fun/good if you're only relying on UBI. In that model I imagine plenty would prefer to keep their job in addition to UBI.
- hogFeast 5y ago
  What is the functional difference then? Your comment elides the point that almost everyone who wants UBI views at this mythical source of extra money from nowhere. The UK already has a welfare state, we have Universal Credit which is basically a consolidated welfare payment to people who need money, and the main complaint (justified if we consider housing costs) is that this isn't enough. I am not exactly sure how paying everyone money helps people who need it more than a system that just gives money to people who need it (particularly as once you introduce UBI, there is zero chance of it ever being removed until it bankrupts the country). It is a nice idea but the actual practical mechanics of the situation (i.e. what people who support this really want, how this compares to what we have) are totally ignored. Public policy always goes through these phases: when you don't have something, it seems like the solution to all your problems. It won't be (again, the main reason why inequality hasn't fallen more in the UK over the past ten years is housing costs...it is the number one issue, nothing else matters).
  - lexicality 5y ago
    > I am not exactly sure how paying everyone money helps people who need it more than a system that just gives money to people who need it I mean one obvious benefit is the monumental amount of savings in government services caused by getting rid of all of the bureaucracy involved in making sure only people who "need" the payment get it. You can get rid of all the job centres, all the review boards, all the DWP departments that have to constantly check people's eligibility etc You also free up time for people that are currently on UC who need to constantly go and confirm that yes, they still can't work. Now they just get the money and can go do whatever without having to justify selling knitting on etsy or whatever
    - 5y ago
bjarneh 5y ago
We have this situation where I live (Norway). I.e. you will get payed pretty much the same for a low paying job as you get payed when unemployed by the government. Note that we don't have minimum wage here, but it's not easy to pay people less than they get in unemployment benefits. It still seems that people choose to work. Of course things could be different in other countries, there are clearly a number of factors at work here....
- alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  > Note that we don't have minimum wage here I'm curious how your UBI actually does compare to someone working a low paid job. For instance, what's the UBI payment per week vs how much would someone working in retail for 40 hours?
  - bjarneh 5y ago
    Our "UBI" will be based on a number of factors. It should be noted that we do not officially have an UBI, but unofficially we do in the form of different programs for the unemployed. If you have been employed lately you will get 62% of your regular salary up to ~70.000 USD, for up to 1 year I think. There's a number of programs if you haven't recently been employed. You can also get free housing. But the sum of all the different programs is that you will end up with roughly the same monthly payment as a low paying job, like retail or something like that. At present probably somewhere around 2000 USD after taxes I would guess. If you consider that a normal salary is probably around 3000 USD after taxes, it's not so bad.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > Our "UBI" will be based on a number of factors. It should be noted that we do not officially have an UBI, but unofficially we do in the form of different programs for the unemployed. That sounds like means-tested welfare which doesn’t stack with earned income. That’s literally the problem UBI sets out to solve, not effectively the same thing as UBI.
beej71 5y ago
It's the same as the incentive to earn $30/hr instead of $15/hr.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Nobody has yet to explain the incentive for minimum paid workers to go to work once UBI payments becomes equal to a minimum paid job. If you have UBI instead of a minimimum income guarantee, it stacks with income from other sources, so the incentive is doubling your income.

lexicality 5y ago

That's a very interesting way of phrasing that question. Do you think the fact that no one would want to do these jobs for minimum wage if they aren't being forced to by threat of poverty might suggest that we need to approach those jobs differently?

cbmuser 5y ago
> Do you think the fact that no one would want to do these jobs for minimum wage if they aren't being forced to by threat of poverty might suggest that we need to approach those jobs differently? So you want to pay your cleaning personnel the same wage as a heart surgeon? Don’t you think that such high wages will eventually just raise prices?
- lexicality 5y ago
  Surely the point of the market is that you need to pay for things based on how difficult it is to get them? Contrived example. Say you have some toilets you want cleaning and you decide to offer the job for $5 an hour + tips from toilet goers. The only person that agrees to do it is some homeless dude. You're not very happy about this, but no one else showed up so you go with it. Then two weeks later the city offers $5/hr UBI and the homeless guy immediately quits. "But wait, if you were scrubbing the toilets you get $10/hr + tips!" you say to him, and he says "ok cool but I'd rather beg on the street" and walks out This means that $10/hr is actually significantly too low for cleaning toilets and the only reason this guy agreed to do it for $5/hr is he would have literally died otherwise You can say "hey, a guy scrubbing toilets should definitely not make more than me, a big important programmer! My job's way harder" but would you scrub toilets for your current salary? I don't think I'd want to. Equally my company could probably give me a 10% pay cut and I'd complain about it but keep doing my job. I like programming. However, the sad truth is society needs people to clean toilets and sweep the streets significantly more than it needs me to write React code for some website. If every cleaner in the world quit simultaneously, it'd be utter chaos. If every frontend dev in the world quit it'd be annoying but no one would die. So why do we pay cleaners so little?
  - chii 5y ago
    > So why do we pay cleaners so little? I'll counter with an example which might illustrate. If you were at a desert, and dying of thirst, you would pay absolutely anything for water. You would not pay anything for diamonds at all. But in normal circumstances, water is cheap, so cheap, that it's almost not metered. Diamonds, however, is still fairly expensive (even artificial ones). Why do we pay so little for water, when it's so essential? Why do we pay so much for diamonds, when it's basically useless cept for being shiny?
    - lexicality 5y ago
      > Why do we pay so little for water, when it's so essential? Because the government says water has to be cheap? There are quite a lot of places in the world where water is not cheap, but where I live there are laws that govern how much it can be sold for. There are certain things that people will pay literally anything for, such as water, food, healthcare etc because they'll die otherwise. Usually the government will step in and set a maximum price for these things to try and make sure people don't die because overall that's bad for the economy. No one's going to die from a dirty toilet though > Why do we pay so much for diamonds, when it's basically useless cept for being shiny? I read a really interesting article about the "diamonds are a girl's best friend" advertising campaign but I can't find it now. The summary is "because the people that own the diamond mines say they're worth it and everyone just goes along with the lie because it makes them feel nice"
- Already__Taken 5y ago
  That's such a strawman as to be dishonest and bring bad faith to the discussion. _nobody_ but you is saying that. By the same logic if a heart surgeon for some reason wanted to drive an uber you think they are getting paid $1000+ now? Why would anything about this change? prices will fluctuate by supply and demand. I could buy 100$ bottles of wine but don't because that's dumb. If I had a million I still wouldn't.

cbmuser 5y ago

The incentive for such jobs will be higher wages which in return means higher prices which eventually compensates for the whole UBI in the first place. Money _cannot_ have any value if it’s not backed by any goods or labor. If your baker gets his UBI, why would he want to get up early and bake your bread in the first place when there is no incentive? Or why would anyone want to sell you anything when the money isn’t actually a „credit“ for any goods or labor. Money is just a convenient method for exchanging goods and labor. If you just give out money to anyone for free without exchanging it for labor, it eventually doesn’t have any value and people will find another currency or go back to exchange goods and labor directly.

alfiedotwtf 5y ago
> If your baker gets his UBI, why would he want to get up early and bake your bread in the first place when there is no incentive? This is why I'm asking. I actually know two bakers, and can guarantee that there's no way they would go to work if they had exactly what they were earning but didn't have to get up and go to work. Extending this out, no baker would consider working unless their pay was above and beyond UBI. And the only way to pay them more while having the same profits to the bakery owner would be to raise prices. This is a direct example of how UBI would definitely cause inflation.

nvoid 5y ago

I don't see anyone one here talking about this. It is already happening with the furlough scheme. Isn't that the experiment already run already? If the furlough scheme meant (some) people don't want to go back to work because they are already earning enough to live comfortably whilst doing nothing, then why would we want UBI? Another problem is the risk of inflation. If everyone in the country has a certain amount of money coming in then shop-keepers are just going to raise their prices. Why wouldn't they? After a few years of this, we are back to square one and the only solution would be to keep raising the UBI.

Turing_Machine 5y ago
> If the furlough scheme meant (some) people don't want to go back to work because they are already earning enough to live comfortably whilst doing nothing, then why would we want UBI? The situations are not the same. At all. With the current setup, the options are 1) don't work and receive $x, or 2) work and receive $x. With UBI, the options would be 1) don't work and receive $x, or 2) work and receive $2x. Would some people rather not work and get $x than work and get $2x? Certainly. But not all of them would. Not even close. I'm not necessarily advocating for UBI, but your presentation of the situation is not accurate.
PeterisP 5y ago
The furlough scheme is conceptually very different as the furlough system explicitly disincentivises going back to work as you lose the furlough money if you do so.

rodiger 5y ago

You don't lose UBI by working. UBI should be intended to be the lowest possible amount of money to live. Life won't be fun/good if you're only relying on UBI. In that model I imagine plenty would prefer to keep their job in addition to UBI.

hogFeast 5y ago
What is the functional difference then? Your comment elides the point that almost everyone who wants UBI views at this mythical source of extra money from nowhere. The UK already has a welfare state, we have Universal Credit which is basically a consolidated welfare payment to people who need money, and the main complaint (justified if we consider housing costs) is that this isn't enough. I am not exactly sure how paying everyone money helps people who need it more than a system that just gives money to people who need it (particularly as once you introduce UBI, there is zero chance of it ever being removed until it bankrupts the country). It is a nice idea but the actual practical mechanics of the situation (i.e. what people who support this really want, how this compares to what we have) are totally ignored. Public policy always goes through these phases: when you don't have something, it seems like the solution to all your problems. It won't be (again, the main reason why inequality hasn't fallen more in the UK over the past ten years is housing costs...it is the number one issue, nothing else matters).
- lexicality 5y ago
  > I am not exactly sure how paying everyone money helps people who need it more than a system that just gives money to people who need it I mean one obvious benefit is the monumental amount of savings in government services caused by getting rid of all of the bureaucracy involved in making sure only people who "need" the payment get it. You can get rid of all the job centres, all the review boards, all the DWP departments that have to constantly check people's eligibility etc You also free up time for people that are currently on UC who need to constantly go and confirm that yes, they still can't work. Now they just get the money and can go do whatever without having to justify selling knitting on etsy or whatever
  - 5y ago

bjarneh 5y ago

We have this situation where I live (Norway). I.e. you will get payed pretty much the same for a low paying job as you get payed when unemployed by the government. Note that we don't have minimum wage here, but it's not easy to pay people less than they get in unemployment benefits. It still seems that people choose to work. Of course things could be different in other countries, there are clearly a number of factors at work here....

alfiedotwtf 5y ago
> Note that we don't have minimum wage here I'm curious how your UBI actually does compare to someone working a low paid job. For instance, what's the UBI payment per week vs how much would someone working in retail for 40 hours?
- bjarneh 5y ago
  Our "UBI" will be based on a number of factors. It should be noted that we do not officially have an UBI, but unofficially we do in the form of different programs for the unemployed. If you have been employed lately you will get 62% of your regular salary up to ~70.000 USD, for up to 1 year I think. There's a number of programs if you haven't recently been employed. You can also get free housing. But the sum of all the different programs is that you will end up with roughly the same monthly payment as a low paying job, like retail or something like that. At present probably somewhere around 2000 USD after taxes I would guess. If you consider that a normal salary is probably around 3000 USD after taxes, it's not so bad.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Our "UBI" will be based on a number of factors. It should be noted that we do not officially have an UBI, but unofficially we do in the form of different programs for the unemployed. That sounds like means-tested welfare which doesn’t stack with earned income. That’s literally the problem UBI sets out to solve, not effectively the same thing as UBI.

beej71 5y ago

It's the same as the incentive to earn $30/hr instead of $15/hr.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dragonwriter 5y ago

> Nobody has yet to explain the incentive for minimum paid workers to go to work once UBI payments becomes equal to a minimum paid job. If you have UBI instead of a minimimum income guarantee, it stacks with income from other sources, so the incentive is doubling your income.