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> For example, "Manitoba, Canada experimented with Mincome, a basic guaranteed income, in the 1970s. In the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, labor only decreased by 1

> 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.

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.