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Universal basic income of £1,600 a month to be trialled in England
- krona 3y ago30 people seems to be far too small of a sample size for any meaningful results, except to conclude the usual "a larger study is needed to confirm or disprove our findings" funding gambit.
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoParticularly as far larger 'experiments' are constantly in progress. Pensions. Annuities. Allowances. And on and on.
- notahacker 3y agoThat's sort of why though. When we've got population scale social experiments with pensions and petrostates giving strong indications that recipients of unconditional incomes sufficient to live off mostly choose not to work and especially avoid certain jobs, it's important to counter that by giving a handful of people £32k over the course of two years and discovering they are happy to have more money and haven't been able to afford to retire yet!
- barbariangrunge 3y agoFor how long? If it’s not dependable and life long, it will skew the results as well
- karaterobot 3y agoAccording to the article, it's for two years.
- HPsquared 3y ago"people won't quit their job over a temporary UBI trial"
- olddustytrail 3y agoThese aren't a sample, they're case studies.
- zdragnar 3y agoIt's not studying universal income, though. The only thing this studies is "do people like getting free money" to which the answer is well known.
- chiefalchemist 3y agoIn theory I hope this works in some way. Alternatives to the current approaches need to be explored. And we're certainly not confident AI will take more jobs / wealth than it create. That said, unless recipients own where they live - housing typically being your single biggest expense - I envision rents increasing because landlords naturally price what the market will bear. Even with UBI we'll eventually be back to where are now with loads of that I going to housing and too little left for anything else. What am I missing?
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoEverything. If economics was just 'housing takes up all the money' well, we could dispense with those expensive college degrees for Economics.
- chiefalchemist 3y agoI'm not looking for an academic view of the world. I'm looking for reality-based, and that reality is...housing eats up a high percentage of income. What's to stop landlords from doing what they do now and pricing what the market will bear? Yes, it's such a simple question. I'm not the one missing anything.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoUBI is just direct wealth redistribution. It doesn’t actually create more housing, it just makes poorer people have more money to bid on housing and richer people have less money to bid on housing. As the landlord, probably rents on lower end properties will rise and and rents on higher end properties will fall if all of UBI was spent on housing and the taxes used to pay for it came out of housing budgets.
- pcthrowaway 3y agoI'm concerned that when everyone receives money, the people and corps with concentrated power/wealth are able to funnel it into their own pockets, and the money becomes worth less over time so that the people receiving it now need the UBI and an income to scrape by. Think about the shift towards dual income households; instead of households becoming more wealthy, society has changed such that it's difficult to survive on one income now (and for people with children, nearly impossible for most). If anything, households combining 2 incomes have a worse standard of living than a single-income household 40 years ago. I strongly believe at this point it would be better for society to prioritize housing, feeding, and attending to the medical needs of everyone; the possibility of paying them can then come later.
- basisword 3y agoIf UBI was implemented fully (everyone in the country gets £x per month) what’s the likelihood basic/essential goods would rocket in price largely negating the impact of the UBI?
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoNone at all. This is a common first thought folks new to UBI put forth. More people with more money to spend means manufacturing volume goes up, so economies of scale go up, so the prices go down. There can be instabilities initially as supply moves to meet demand. But folks didn't used to 'need' those things, got along without them (didn't have the money for them) and so can make their own decisions about what they'll spend their money on. The fundamental property of UBI is, let people sort out what their needs are themselves.
- UtopiaPunk 3y agoIn a universal system, what stops the landlord from raising rent an extra £1600 (or whatever the UBI amount is)?
- ceejayoz 3y agoThe answers to this vary from public housing options to rent control to guillotines.
- Simulacra 3y agoIn other words, the only way it could work is through total government control of the market to keep businesses from raising prices. Completely illogical in western society.
- ceejayoz 3y agoWestern society has plenty of existing controls on price gouging. Housing is often especially heavily regulated.
- underyx 3y agoReminder that the "universal" in "universal basic income" means that every single person in a population gets payments. Since this one is given to 30 people maximum, it's a trial of just a "basic income". For an actual UBI trial, follow GiveDirectly's work which has been ongoing since 2016: https://www.givedirectly.org/ubi-study/ https://www.givedirectly.org/ubi-study/
- s1artibartfast 3y agoUbi is just marketing jargon at this point for targeted cash welfare payments Even that link isn't a universal basic income test. It's just welfare payments, which have been around for a century at this point.
- samstave 3y ago[flagged]
- s1artibartfast 3y agoI'm not sure what you're reacting to here. I wasn't presenting an argument for or against welfare payments
- samstave 3y agoI think its more about the use of the term "welfare" as compared to what the "state" pulls in "taxes" == 'taxes can be equated as NATIONAL WELFARE' and then from that funnel the SOCIAL expenses of a country are derived ; this is the problem. ZYou have people who think that taxes are tantamount to a nations capability... But when said nations are questioned on the pull and press of the taxed income - they punish constituents. Thus revolutions.
- JoeyBananas 3y agoRealistically, this study will serve to add another entry to the growing volume of UBI literature that basically says "Peoples lives are improved by free money." It will be used to argue "Research suggests that welfare programs should be expanded"
- mytailorisrich 3y ago53 million people are over 18 in the UK, so an unconditional £1,600 a month paid by the State to everyone would cost a staggering £85 billion a month. UBI as an unconditional, liveable, income paid to everyone is not a realistic option unless or until we get to a fully post-work society in which all people no longer work, which is Sci-Fi at the moment. It's much more realistic to organise the welfare state so that benefits kick in and guarantee that someone's income will not fall below a minimum, which more or less already exists in many European countries. That's a guaranteed basic income but only paid by the State when someone's income falls below it, e.g. because of unemployment.
- mjburgess 3y agowhich is more than the current total expenditure of the entire government: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/image_data/file/156752/PSS_July_2022_Image_4.jpg https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
- partiallypro 3y agoWe could just do a negative income tax, which achieves the same thing and is substantially cheaper in terms of bureaucratic costs than traditional welfare programs and is also much cheaper than UBI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
- notahacker 3y agoA "negative income tax" is UBI (minus the presumption the amount needs to be enough to live on, in some formulations..) The "bureaucratic costs" argument is not something anyone that's paid any attention whatsoever to the actual numbers can make. The number of working age people who currently receive a livable income or equivalent in services from welfare programmes is a very small proportion of the total number of working age people who don't work enough to pay [non-trivial amounts of] income tax. If you're suddenly paying many more millions a livable income, you're not funding that through making a few thousand Jobcentre staff redundant.
- spacetime_cmplx 3y agoNegative income tax is an alternative to UBI, but it's discussed less often. Does anyone know why? I feel it should be easier to implement (plugs right into the existing tax system), should be cheaper (the more you earn, the less you get), and feels more in line with the progressive tax system, whereas UBI feels like an extremely coarse first approximation. Essentially, the tax curve starts at 0 and goes up. Why not shift it down? There's nothing special about 0.
- mach1ne 3y agoUBI is easier to understand conceptually. There could be more advantages to it though, over negative income tax, but they’re a bit difficult to discover.
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- david-gpu 3y agoI agree that combining UBI with the existing income taxes seems like a sensible way to implement it. It also automatically makes it available to every legal tax resident, regardless of whether they are in the country via a work permit, a residence permit, or citizenship. Taxing somebody and not providing them with an UBI would be unfair.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoBecause negative income tax credits and tax deductions are already common place and boring. The US has a $3000 child tax credit which applies to approximately 80 million children [1] The US has a $13,000 tax deduction, taken by >200 million people last, Lower income folks making less than 20k already get ~40K of benefits, credits, and deductions.[2] https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/child-tax-credit https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/child-tax... https://www.illinoispolicy.org/illinois-warped-welfare-system-traps-families-in-poverty/ https://www.illinoispolicy.org/illinois-warped-welfare-syste...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- omgomgomgomg 3y agoWell, that barely covers the rent for a bedsit in London. Better deal if you get shortlisted for council housing, and then you take the 1600 quid, that would be alright.
- SeanLuke 3y agoA classic style maxim: never use a word if a shorter, more common word exists which means the same thing. The canonical example is "utilize", rather than "use". Like most violations of this maxim, utilize came about thanks to bureaucratic Official Style. If there was a second contender for canonical example, it would have to be the use of "trial" as a verb. There are not one but TWO perfectly good words, both shorter than "trial", which cover its entire usage as a verb: "try" and "test". In fact, "trial" is the NOUN FORM of "try". And now they've converted it into a new verb form rather than just using the original verb? Universal basic income of £1,600 a month to be TRIED in England.
- Jedd 3y agoEveryone saying 'rent in (place with high rent cost here)' will chew that down -- one of the more fascinating outcomes from UBI will be a de-centralising of population. This 'study' has a few problems, as others have observed it doesn't warrant the U in UBI, and the 2y drop-dead timeframe will also significantly affect the outcomes, but trying to shoot this experiment in the head with 'rent in London is expensive' is to really miss the point (of both this study, and the concept of UBI).
- juancn 3y agoThat's not a trial, that's a joke. You have to give it to literally everyone (or a large chunk of the population, let's say 80%) and wait a couple months to really see the effects on inflation and other metrics. Just a handful of people is wishful thinking with little actual information received. The best parallel for me was the stimulus checks and packages many governments gave during the pandemic, and we know how that ended on a macro-economic level.
- ksec 3y agoThese UBI trails have been coming up again and again without actually solving anything. 95% of the developed world have a problem with housing cost. UBI does little to zero to solve that. May be worth submitting this on HN from @patrickc https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1665087620798349318 https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1665087620798349318 https://www.sambowman.co/p/democracy-is-the-solution-to-vetocracy https://www.sambowman.co/p/democracy-is-the-solution-to-veto...
- chippy 3y agoThe pilot project has yet to secure funding for the trial. Report with more details: https://autonomy.work/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/BASINC.pdf https://autonomy.work/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/BASINC.pdf