7 ms·

Multiple studies of where basic income was tried in the real world found it to reduce work. For example, "Manitoba, Canada experimented with Mincome, a basic g

Multiple studies of where basic income was tried in the real world found it to reduce work. For example, "Manitoba, Canada experimented with Mincome, a basic guaranteed income, in the 1970s. In the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, labor only decreased by 13%, much less than expected" [1]. There are plenty of others. I expect a targeted need use of scarce resources (tax money) is a much better use for helping those who need it, instead of ham handedly giving it regardless of need, thereby shorting those who need it at the benefit of many who do not. And the current inflation (and previous events where govts gave out decent sums of cash to help short term other econ issues) shows what happens when people get money for free - prices rise to absorb it. The reason being if person X is willing to put in pain Y for product Z, this does not change if you rescale the meaning of money. Product Z simply rises to cause person to put in the same pain to obtain it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income

rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
Bullshit work?
pc86 5y ago
UBI without the U is just welfare, which is fine, but it's kind of odd to say that UBI would be better if we just did "thing that makes it by definition no longer UBI." I totally agree with you on re: inflation, though. Some organization, presumably government, will need to manage any UBI implementation, and government is nothing if not an inefficient allocator of its resources. I worry any broad national UBI system will just raise inflation to absorb the prices, while increases tax on the entire population, and losing a non-trivial percentage of that increase in the transfer.
- rottencupcakes 5y ago
  Assuming we don’t want to MMT / money printer this, to keep a balanced budget, any UBI system would have to be accompanied by an increase in taxes. These taxes would presumably be very progressive. This effectively would end up more than negating the effect of UBI on the richer people, thus turning it into a directed welfare program. UBI and directed welfare are essentially same same.
  - xyzzyz 5y ago
    In US, these taxes wouldn’t be particularly progressive. US taxes are already very progressive, much more so than in Europe. In US, the wealthy already pay overwhelming majority of the tax. If US was to embark on European level governmental spending, it would have to introduce more European-like taxation system, where bulk of the revenue is collected from middle and working class.
    - rottencupcakes 5y ago
      20%+ VAT baby.
  - lukebuehler 5y ago
    Exactly, I came to say the same thing. You could pay for UBI with some MMT trick, but you‘d just end up inflating/rescaling all the prices. It would only work as a massive wealth redistribution program where the rich and middle class get heavily taxed. The latter is infinitely more difficult to implement than the former, but technically both would be UBI.
TehCorwiz 5y ago
How much of that labor reduction was second jobs?
jhauris 5y ago
If UBI could be implemented in around the same cost as the welfare programs it replaces, it would have a net zero effect on inflation. The downside of nearly all current forms of welfare (in the U.S.) is that they largely enforce the poverty gap. You get to a point where a small increase in pay causes a large decrease in benefits, and you become trapped unless you can get a large enough pay increase to jump the gap. The two big ifs are: would UBI be the same cost as current welfare programs, and can we actually get rid of current welfare if we roll out UBI? There is a tremendous amount of overhead involved in current welfare programs, so it's not unreasonable that the first question is could be resolved. Politically, the second issue seems unlikely to be implemented.
- ChrisLomont 5y ago
  >If UBI could be implemented in around the same cost as the welfare programs it replaces, it would have a net zero effect on inflation It cannot, unless you're ok with screwing those already on such programs. Do the math, and you'll find it is not even close. Welfare programs (unless you include SS) are given to a tiny amount of people - spreading that across a large group of people simply screws those who need it most. If you include SS, now again you're screwing old people who many times need the money to give it to people capable of work. >The downside of nearly all current forms of welfare (in the U.S.) is that they largely enforce the poverty gap. You get to a point where a small increase in pay causes a large decrease in benefits, and you become trapped unless you can get a large enough pay increase to jump the gap. This common claim is not true. There are ample people moving out of such program regularly, and many of them have limited lifetime benefits. >would UBI be the same cost as current welfare programs, No. I've been down this set of math lots of times. Do it - all welfare budgets are public, population is public, it's easy to estimate.
  - loceng 5y ago
    You make accepting UBI optional, so if the $1,000 per month or existing services is better for your situation then you get to decide - not the government; e.g. maybe you have 6 kids and food stamps etc you get is way better than the $1,000/month. This way there is also a statistics dashboard that we can see who's choosing what and optimize more precisely. You force corporations to pay, to not be able to avoid taxes - using a VAT that's customizable so things like diapers have say 0% tax vs. buying ads on Facebook has 80% tax. The nuanced ability to lever different goods and services allows tax to be fine-tuned to cover all costs until the floor quality of life is covered/existing for all. We can supply everything 90%+ of what people need through automation, the remaining 10% or less will be the engineers and system and machine designers and maintainers - while the 90%+ can focus self-improvement/education, family/community and being creative/artistic etc.
rwmj 5y ago
> Multiple studies of where basic income was tried in the real world found it to reduce work. Isn't that a good outcome? Humans get more leisure time.
- caskstrength 5y ago
  Not for the other group who will have products of their labor "redistributed" to pay for other's leisure time?
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    Gettting rid of serfdom, debt prisons and endentured servitude all reduced work and caused products of labour to be redistributed. Who said that current distribution of products of labour between Amazok and their workers is optimal?
    - caskstrength 5y ago
      We all fantasize Bezos and Musk should pay for it, but in reality it will be yet another tax on middle class (e.g. run-of-the-mill senior developer from high CoL area, so from Amazon engineer to (would be ex) Amazon warehouse worker).
      - notahacker 5y ago
        Would be even broader than that (run-of-the-mill junior dev in high CoL ara to lower middle class homeowner that fancies early retirement)
    - ryan93 5y ago
      If we are getting rid of serfdom why has no one suggested this money goes to third world workers?
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    If those people aren't getting paid a very high wage, they can reduce their working hours too. If they are getting paid a very high wage, then they already had the leverage needed to reduce their working hours, and they were choosing not to. They'll still make plenty of money.
criddell 5y ago
> I expect a targeted need use of scarce resources (tax money) is a much better use for helping those who need it That might be true but it also might not be true. If you add a bunch of rules to the program it can increase the administrative cost a lot and leave you with less money to distribute. I'm not sure if it's true, but when I was a kid I heard that Canada's baby bonus (Canada Child Benefit) was made universal because of this.
- wefarrell 5y ago
  Exactly. Part of the appeal of UBI is that it doesn't come with a ton of bureaucratic overhead.
  - ChrisLomont 5y ago
    Look up and demonstrate this "ton of bureaucratic overhead". All US programs have efficiency ratings you can find. There is not the overhead you (and UBI people in general) claim. Pick the system you think is most inefficient, then look up to find admin budget versus money paid out. I've done all this, under the same initial belief you have, and it's simply not true. And UBI will also require the same overhead to collect and dole out - it is simply a different tax redistribution method than current ones, and will not be zero overhad.
    - hooande 5y ago
      You've made claims up and down this thread that amount to "trust me" or "look it up". None of these are simple factual matters like "What is the capital of Egypt?". There are numerous studies about basic income, all driven by different assumptions and biases. No one knows exactly which one you're referring to when you say "look it up". It's impossible to have a detailed discussion when everyone isn't evaluating the same information. If you can tell us the % of bureaucratic overhead that's consumed by the US welfare system, then please do so. Otherwise you can simply say nothing.
      - ChrisLomont 5y ago
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"shows what happens when people get money for free - prices rise to absorb it" A - so prices of $40,000 cars have increased becauae people got $2000 or whatever for free? What is that as percentage of wages, 0.5% How about this massive supply chain and manufacturing disruption, could that somehow be responsible? B - the wealthy and corporations were getting money for free for 20 years, it's called quanittative easing, and it caused massive inflation of asset prices > "pain Y for product Z, this does not change if you rescale the meaning of money." Usually economic theories talk about productivity, resources and velocity of money. This stuff about pain sounds like it came out of a sadistic religious cult.
- ChrisLomont 5y ago
  >How about this massive supply chain and manufacturing disruption, could that somehow be responsible? That is part of it. Fortunately there are plenty of other examples in US and other country history where money handouts are clearly a driver, so it's not a question of whether or not easy money adds to inflation. As mot economists put it, all long term inflation is ultimately the result of more money in the system. >This stuff about pain sounds like it came out of a sadistic religious cult. Not a rebuttal. If Bob willing to work job X for Y hours to get apartment Z, simply rescaling the value of money (inflation) will not change that Bob is willing to work job X for Y hours to get apartment Z. Do you think this is not true? That he gets 37 yotobucks or 19 fishcoins or 39801892 bubblenotes is irrelevant. He is willing to trade time and effort for goods. If the value of the currency moves he is still willing to do this. Free money will not, and historically has not, come without costs.
  - qwytw 5y ago
    UBI however would mostly transfer this cost to high-income earners (if financed through taxation) or capital owners (if financed by debt/printing money). Basically it's just a form of progressive taxation with a large safety need (without a means test) at the bottom, which would function as a mechanism to decrease inequality (which some economists believe negatively affects economic growth). Also another factor (and I'm personally not fully convinced on this) is that it would would actually result in higher overall productivity longterm by giving more people the opportunity to invest their time into gaining new skills etc.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> For example, "Manitoba, Canada experimented with Mincome, a basic guaranteed income, in the 1970s. In the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, labor only decreased by 13%, much less than expected" The phrasing tries to downplay the number, but 1 in 8 people stopping work is very significant. > And the current inflation (and previous events where govts gave out decent sums of cash to help short term other econ issues) shows what happens when people get money for free - prices rise to absorb it. The reason being if person X is willing to put in pain Y for product Z, this does not change if you rescale the meaning of money. Yes: If you give everyone extra money and theoretically nobody quits working, it's hard to argue that the extra money wouldn't just go to rising prices. We're already seeing this with supply-constrained resources like housing: In hot cities, people will pay whatever they have to in order to outbid their competitors for houses or apartments. Pouring more money into the situation would only make the numbers go up, but the root problem still exists.
- loceng 5y ago
  Do you know how many people stopped working when automation began?
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > Do you know how many people stopped working when automation began? What do you mean? Labor force participation has been trending upward over the last 100 years, not downward. For an extreme example, fewer than 10% of married women were in the workforce around 1900. Now it's closer to 3 out of 4 married women in the workforce.
- snek_case 5y ago
  > The phrasing tries to downplay the number, but 1 in 8 people stopping work is very significant. I agree that seems very significant. Unemployment is considered to be quite high when it's at 8% for instance. During the pandemic, we've had to pay people monthly cheques because we forced businesses to shut down, and it's been difficult to get people to return to work. Granted, this isn't the same as UBI, and there are conflating factors, but currently, we're in a situation where we have high inflation and a labor shortage. That's not very encouraging. In my mind, if we want to implement something like UBI, we need a way to control the inflation it might generate. It might also not be realistic to do this until we have something like general purpose robots to counter the labor shortage. Another problem is just how we finance something like this. Increasing taxes on the general population seems like a pretty bad idea. We'd have to fund it through money printing, but again, how do we control the resulting inflation? High sales taxes? Increasing income taxes in the higher brackets would create a situation where it's less worthwhile to work hard.
retrac 5y ago
You are correct. But as the Mincome report itself noted, some of the people who were most likely to decrease hours were young parents, especially single mothers, and students who returned to school. At least some of that decrease was a positive social outcome, probably.
Kim_Bruning 5y ago
From your source: "However, the only two groups who worked significantly less were new mothers, and teenagers working to support their families. New mothers spent this time with their infant children, and working teenagers put significant additional time into their schooling" Note that 13% is likely the net value, so if this group slowed down, possibly other groups actually started working harder at the same time, compensating for some of the loss.

rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago

Bullshit work?

pc86 5y ago

UBI without the U is just welfare, which is fine, but it's kind of odd to say that UBI would be better if we just did "thing that makes it by definition no longer UBI." I totally agree with you on re: inflation, though. Some organization, presumably government, will need to manage any UBI implementation, and government is nothing if not an inefficient allocator of its resources. I worry any broad national UBI system will just raise inflation to absorb the prices, while increases tax on the entire population, and losing a non-trivial percentage of that increase in the transfer.

rottencupcakes 5y ago
Assuming we don’t want to MMT / money printer this, to keep a balanced budget, any UBI system would have to be accompanied by an increase in taxes. These taxes would presumably be very progressive. This effectively would end up more than negating the effect of UBI on the richer people, thus turning it into a directed welfare program. UBI and directed welfare are essentially same same.
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  In US, these taxes wouldn’t be particularly progressive. US taxes are already very progressive, much more so than in Europe. In US, the wealthy already pay overwhelming majority of the tax. If US was to embark on European level governmental spending, it would have to introduce more European-like taxation system, where bulk of the revenue is collected from middle and working class.
  - rottencupcakes 5y ago
    20%+ VAT baby.
- lukebuehler 5y ago
  Exactly, I came to say the same thing. You could pay for UBI with some MMT trick, but you‘d just end up inflating/rescaling all the prices. It would only work as a massive wealth redistribution program where the rich and middle class get heavily taxed. The latter is infinitely more difficult to implement than the former, but technically both would be UBI.

TehCorwiz 5y ago

How much of that labor reduction was second jobs?

jhauris 5y ago

If UBI could be implemented in around the same cost as the welfare programs it replaces, it would have a net zero effect on inflation. The downside of nearly all current forms of welfare (in the U.S.) is that they largely enforce the poverty gap. You get to a point where a small increase in pay causes a large decrease in benefits, and you become trapped unless you can get a large enough pay increase to jump the gap. The two big ifs are: would UBI be the same cost as current welfare programs, and can we actually get rid of current welfare if we roll out UBI? There is a tremendous amount of overhead involved in current welfare programs, so it's not unreasonable that the first question is could be resolved. Politically, the second issue seems unlikely to be implemented.

ChrisLomont 5y ago
>If UBI could be implemented in around the same cost as the welfare programs it replaces, it would have a net zero effect on inflation It cannot, unless you're ok with screwing those already on such programs. Do the math, and you'll find it is not even close. Welfare programs (unless you include SS) are given to a tiny amount of people - spreading that across a large group of people simply screws those who need it most. If you include SS, now again you're screwing old people who many times need the money to give it to people capable of work. >The downside of nearly all current forms of welfare (in the U.S.) is that they largely enforce the poverty gap. You get to a point where a small increase in pay causes a large decrease in benefits, and you become trapped unless you can get a large enough pay increase to jump the gap. This common claim is not true. There are ample people moving out of such program regularly, and many of them have limited lifetime benefits. >would UBI be the same cost as current welfare programs, No. I've been down this set of math lots of times. Do it - all welfare budgets are public, population is public, it's easy to estimate.
- loceng 5y ago
  You make accepting UBI optional, so if the $1,000 per month or existing services is better for your situation then you get to decide - not the government; e.g. maybe you have 6 kids and food stamps etc you get is way better than the $1,000/month. This way there is also a statistics dashboard that we can see who's choosing what and optimize more precisely. You force corporations to pay, to not be able to avoid taxes - using a VAT that's customizable so things like diapers have say 0% tax vs. buying ads on Facebook has 80% tax. The nuanced ability to lever different goods and services allows tax to be fine-tuned to cover all costs until the floor quality of life is covered/existing for all. We can supply everything 90%+ of what people need through automation, the remaining 10% or less will be the engineers and system and machine designers and maintainers - while the 90%+ can focus self-improvement/education, family/community and being creative/artistic etc.

rwmj 5y ago

> Multiple studies of where basic income was tried in the real world found it to reduce work. Isn't that a good outcome? Humans get more leisure time.

caskstrength 5y ago
Not for the other group who will have products of their labor "redistributed" to pay for other's leisure time?
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  Gettting rid of serfdom, debt prisons and endentured servitude all reduced work and caused products of labour to be redistributed. Who said that current distribution of products of labour between Amazok and their workers is optimal?
  - caskstrength 5y ago
    We all fantasize Bezos and Musk should pay for it, but in reality it will be yet another tax on middle class (e.g. run-of-the-mill senior developer from high CoL area, so from Amazon engineer to (would be ex) Amazon warehouse worker).
    - notahacker 5y ago
      Would be even broader than that (run-of-the-mill junior dev in high CoL ara to lower middle class homeowner that fancies early retirement)
  - ryan93 5y ago
    If we are getting rid of serfdom why has no one suggested this money goes to third world workers?
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  If those people aren't getting paid a very high wage, they can reduce their working hours too. If they are getting paid a very high wage, then they already had the leverage needed to reduce their working hours, and they were choosing not to. They'll still make plenty of money.

criddell 5y ago

> I expect a targeted need use of scarce resources (tax money) is a much better use for helping those who need it That might be true but it also might not be true. If you add a bunch of rules to the program it can increase the administrative cost a lot and leave you with less money to distribute. I'm not sure if it's true, but when I was a kid I heard that Canada's baby bonus (Canada Child Benefit) was made universal because of this.

wefarrell 5y ago
Exactly. Part of the appeal of UBI is that it doesn't come with a ton of bureaucratic overhead.
- ChrisLomont 5y ago
  Look up and demonstrate this "ton of bureaucratic overhead". All US programs have efficiency ratings you can find. There is not the overhead you (and UBI people in general) claim. Pick the system you think is most inefficient, then look up to find admin budget versus money paid out. I've done all this, under the same initial belief you have, and it's simply not true. And UBI will also require the same overhead to collect and dole out - it is simply a different tax redistribution method than current ones, and will not be zero overhad.
  - hooande 5y ago
    You've made claims up and down this thread that amount to "trust me" or "look it up". None of these are simple factual matters like "What is the capital of Egypt?". There are numerous studies about basic income, all driven by different assumptions and biases. No one knows exactly which one you're referring to when you say "look it up". It's impossible to have a detailed discussion when everyone isn't evaluating the same information. If you can tell us the % of bureaucratic overhead that's consumed by the US welfare system, then please do so. Otherwise you can simply say nothing.
    - ChrisLomont 5y ago

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

"shows what happens when people get money for free - prices rise to absorb it" A - so prices of $40,000 cars have increased becauae people got $2000 or whatever for free? What is that as percentage of wages, 0.5% How about this massive supply chain and manufacturing disruption, could that somehow be responsible? B - the wealthy and corporations were getting money for free for 20 years, it's called quanittative easing, and it caused massive inflation of asset prices > "pain Y for product Z, this does not change if you rescale the meaning of money." Usually economic theories talk about productivity, resources and velocity of money. This stuff about pain sounds like it came out of a sadistic religious cult.

ChrisLomont 5y ago
>How about this massive supply chain and manufacturing disruption, could that somehow be responsible? That is part of it. Fortunately there are plenty of other examples in US and other country history where money handouts are clearly a driver, so it's not a question of whether or not easy money adds to inflation. As mot economists put it, all long term inflation is ultimately the result of more money in the system. >This stuff about pain sounds like it came out of a sadistic religious cult. Not a rebuttal. If Bob willing to work job X for Y hours to get apartment Z, simply rescaling the value of money (inflation) will not change that Bob is willing to work job X for Y hours to get apartment Z. Do you think this is not true? That he gets 37 yotobucks or 19 fishcoins or 39801892 bubblenotes is irrelevant. He is willing to trade time and effort for goods. If the value of the currency moves he is still willing to do this. Free money will not, and historically has not, come without costs.
- qwytw 5y ago
  UBI however would mostly transfer this cost to high-income earners (if financed through taxation) or capital owners (if financed by debt/printing money). Basically it's just a form of progressive taxation with a large safety need (without a means test) at the bottom, which would function as a mechanism to decrease inequality (which some economists believe negatively affects economic growth). Also another factor (and I'm personally not fully convinced on this) is that it would would actually result in higher overall productivity longterm by giving more people the opportunity to invest their time into gaining new skills etc.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> For example, "Manitoba, Canada experimented with Mincome, a basic guaranteed income, in the 1970s. In the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, labor only decreased by 13%, much less than expected" The phrasing tries to downplay the number, but 1 in 8 people stopping work is very significant. > And the current inflation (and previous events where govts gave out decent sums of cash to help short term other econ issues) shows what happens when people get money for free - prices rise to absorb it. The reason being if person X is willing to put in pain Y for product Z, this does not change if you rescale the meaning of money. Yes: If you give everyone extra money and theoretically nobody quits working, it's hard to argue that the extra money wouldn't just go to rising prices. We're already seeing this with supply-constrained resources like housing: In hot cities, people will pay whatever they have to in order to outbid their competitors for houses or apartments. Pouring more money into the situation would only make the numbers go up, but the root problem still exists.

loceng 5y ago
Do you know how many people stopped working when automation began?
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > Do you know how many people stopped working when automation began? What do you mean? Labor force participation has been trending upward over the last 100 years, not downward. For an extreme example, fewer than 10% of married women were in the workforce around 1900. Now it's closer to 3 out of 4 married women in the workforce.
snek_case 5y ago
> The phrasing tries to downplay the number, but 1 in 8 people stopping work is very significant. I agree that seems very significant. Unemployment is considered to be quite high when it's at 8% for instance. During the pandemic, we've had to pay people monthly cheques because we forced businesses to shut down, and it's been difficult to get people to return to work. Granted, this isn't the same as UBI, and there are conflating factors, but currently, we're in a situation where we have high inflation and a labor shortage. That's not very encouraging. In my mind, if we want to implement something like UBI, we need a way to control the inflation it might generate. It might also not be realistic to do this until we have something like general purpose robots to counter the labor shortage. Another problem is just how we finance something like this. Increasing taxes on the general population seems like a pretty bad idea. We'd have to fund it through money printing, but again, how do we control the resulting inflation? High sales taxes? Increasing income taxes in the higher brackets would create a situation where it's less worthwhile to work hard.

retrac 5y ago

You are correct. But as the Mincome report itself noted, some of the people who were most likely to decrease hours were young parents, especially single mothers, and students who returned to school. At least some of that decrease was a positive social outcome, probably.

Kim_Bruning 5y ago

From your source: "However, the only two groups who worked significantly less were new mothers, and teenagers working to support their families. New mothers spent this time with their infant children, and working teenagers put significant additional time into their schooling" Note that 13% is likely the net value, so if this group slowed down, possibly other groups actually started working harder at the same time, compensating for some of the loss.