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Universal basic income of nearly $2000/mo to be trialed in UK for the first time
- fwungy 3y agoI'm running a political party that will give everyone $2000/month at a minimum. If another party promises more money we will beat it by 15%. We will always give the people more money than any other party.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- codedokode 3y agoThis whole idea is stupid. How about giving proper financial support for parents and covering all expenses for raising a child and not just give away money to lazy people who don't want to work and contribute nothing to society.
- zeusk 3y agoThis whole idea is stupid. How about giving proper financial support for unfortunate and beaten down people and covering all expenses for sustaining life and not just give away money to lazy parents who don't want to work and contribute nothing to society.
- codedokode 3y agoParents contribute to society by providing future workers and soldiers.
- surgical_fire 3y agoWell, this is a nice change of pace of governments giving money and "get out of jail free cards" to their cronies that belong to the rich elites, who quite often are damaging to society, instead of simply "not contributing".
- sublinear 3y agoWho says these 30 recipients aren't politically connected?
- surgical_fire 3y agoThe 'U' in "UBI" has a meaning. Unless you are implying that everyone is politically connected, I'll guess that you are just throwing any argument against a wall to see if anything sticks.
- cheeseomlit 3y agoIts just a cynical power play as usual. "Vote for me and I'll give you money" is a platform as old as politics
- grey_earthling 3y ago> This whole idea is stupid. How about giving proper financial support for parents and covering all expenses for raising a child — like a universal basic income — > and not just give away money to lazy people who don't want to work and contribute nothing to society. — like “investors' dividends”. This argument makes more sense against capitalism than against this.
- codedokode 3y agoAs the amount of money is limited it is important to set priorities. If you have extra money to give away then it is better to give them to parents to promote creating families, to pay for education for children from poor families, to improve free medicine, to create new jobs etc. It doesn't make sense to give money to people who are just lazy and got used to spending their parents' money instead of working. They will just spend money on alcohol, cigarettes or online games.
- bubbleRefuge 3y agoThe Job Guarantee proposal is much better [1]. At its essence is to guarantee a federally funded job to anyone that wants one with a living wage and full benefits. This would tighten the labor market, put a floor on it, and lift society from the ground up. Firms would then have to provide better jobs than the guarantee if they want labor. 1. https://gimms.org.uk/job-guarantee/ https://gimms.org.uk/job-guarantee/
- fwungy 3y agoExactly. Government preferences should be given to people raising children, regardless of race, sexuality, or gender. Much of the social services network is about supporting children. If parents were given job preference over other identity categories it would be a) fair and b) protect children without creating social service costs.
- welshwelsh 3y agoSubsiding parenthood is far worse than subsidizing laziness. The opposite would be better: give financial support to people only if they agree not to waste that money on kids they can't afford to have.
- codedokode 3y agoThen almost anyone except software developers and riches won't be able to have kids, and 20-30 years later there will be nobody to serve in the army and protect your country. Great plan.
- skymast 3y agoNext years headlines "Why did food prices skyrocket?" Socialism never works, not even this time. Not even next time.
- rndmize 3y agoDo you mean last year's headlines? Or this years?
- kgwxd 3y agoCapitalism didn't work either. Maybe we should try a little of both at the same time.
- PM_me_your_math 3y ago[flagged]
- uoaei 3y agoI don't think you know what the word socialist actually means. Biden is certainly not that. And the issue with the energy is due largely to price and supply games by MBS and the other gangsters of OPEC. The whole point is to get naive and ignorant people to blame Biden for something out of his control so they can force a narrative that helps the chances of other demagogues and sycophants of the gilded dictators.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y agoSocialism is when the government does stuff. /s
- PM_me_your_math 3y agoOn day one Joey Feebles neutered our energy industry. The president sets energy policy, or didn't you know? Do you honestly believe that the executive who sets policy has no effect?
- kgwxd 3y agoI don't get how you can trial UBI and get much out of it. Being universal is the key concept. If everyone had it, the entire economy would change direction. Do they do these just to say "look, we tried, and it didn't work"?
- dpflan 3y agoAre you saying because everyone gets it, it's a wash? Isn't it more about how the money moves around the economy? Others are pointing out the small sample size, which makes this seem pretty insignificant to impact the economy, and more about the people's experience and change in living/living quality.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoThe whole point of UBI is that it is universal, and therefore causes those at the very bottom to immediately renegotiate their pay to quality of life ratio. Without this action on a mass scale, it cannot flow up the chain to properly adjust the supply and demand curves to fulfill the goals of UBI.
- nwah1 3y agoWhether that is what GP was saying or not, I don't know. But everyone receiving a basic income guarantee, with no other economic changes, would mean that the amount that landlords and other rent-seekers could expect to charge would dramatically increase, and almost all of the benefits would go to those who hold all the bargaining power by controlling the essentials of life. Money isn't wealth. Bargaining power is wealth. Adding more magic numbers in a broad-based way doesn't change the bargaining power. The main change is that funds would be diverted from productive enterprises to rent-seeking ones.
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoAt some point tax laws would be changed. I can think of several ways they could change so have no idea what would be the ultimate result.
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- sublinear 3y ago> Thirty people in the U.K. could soon receive £1,600 ($1,983) each month if the trial by independent think tank Autonomy secures funding. The basic income payments are estimated to cost £1.15 million through the duration of the two-year project. This is much cheaper than other political tactics and obviously these are cherry picked recipients. This is awful.
- samvher 3y agoCare to expand on your thinking here? In what way do you think these recipients would be cherry picked, and what do you think would be the political goals?
- sublinear 3y agoThis is the political equivalent of paid Amazon reviews. The goal is to be the winning despot for a socialist regime. It's like the lottery, but for power. They're never going to stop these "trials" until anti-bribery laws are updated to include false philanthropy.
- uoaei 3y agoWould love for you to expound on how 30 votes will change the outcomes of elections.
- cheeseomlit 3y agoIf you're running a study like this and want to ensure a certain result to support your take on the issue it'd be easy to pick recipients to reinforce whatever your goals are. IE. only choose people with stable employment who won't all quit their jobs immediately when they start getting checks, or the opposite if your goal is to sink UBI.
- throw__away7391 3y agoHere's how all these experiments should work: first participants volunteer, then everyone who volunteers will pay a special tax to pay benefits for the duration of the program. Taking outside money and funneling into a closed system is guaranteed to produce distorted results, likely to be made worse because anyone running such an experiment is extremely likely to have a strong pre-existing pro-UBI bias that makes the result even more of a foregone conclusion.
- b800h 3y ago"Thirty people in the U.K. could soon receive £1,600 ($1,983) each month if the trial by independent think tank Autonomy secures funding." Yeah, I'm running one of these too, and I'll give people £5k each month if I receive funding. How is this news?
- candiddevmike 3y agoIf I get 5 people to fund you, can I get 5k a month? Perhaps we could design a tiered system based on how many people are brought in to fund your think tank, possibly in the shape of a triangle.
- pelagicAustral 3y agoI want in on this.
- Our_Benefactors 3y agoIt’s not news, it’s journalism.
- zackees 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- senko 3y agoAny serious UBI study would look at entire population of a town/county/region, not thirty people. This is beyond useless.
- 0xbadc0de5 3y agoBut it was studied many times across large populations. USSR, Cambodia, North Korea, Venezuela, Hungary, Somalia, etc, etc... They didn't use the same euphemism, but they did take it seriously and to its logical conclusion.
- senko 3y agoAs someone who's lived in a communist country, no, that had nothing to do with UBI. The related communist motto is "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs"[0]. Basically, you have to work to the best of your ability, and what you'll get is whatever someone on top decides you need. You don't need to go further than that to realize that idea is bonkers. The idea of UBI is universal basic income with no strings attached. It does not preclude having other income, nor does it require any work to be performed. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_ability,_to_each_according_to_his_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi...
- 0xbadc0de5 3y agoWhere does the tax revenue that funds UBI come from? (those who are able). Where do UBI payments go? (those who need). It's written right on the tin. What happens when those who can't or won't contribute realize they "need" more? The "no strings attached" idea is a fantasy. How many times do we need to learn the same lesson.
- senko 3y agoI don't know if that misread is intentional or not, so I'm going to assume the best: U in UBI is universal. Everyone gets it, not just those who need. You get $X/mo! That homeless guy on the corner gets $X/mo! Jeff Bezos gets $X! That $X gives you the ability to tell your boss to shove it, and avoid a burnout. The same $X helps that homeless guy to stop being homeless and get a new chance for life of happiness. But Jeff Bezos doesn't give a shit about $X. He wants superyachts, hypercars and phallic rockets and $X ain't gonna do it. So he makes gazillion $, pays a smaller number of gazillion $ in taxes, and funds $X for you, the homeless guys and a million other less driven, talented or fortunate souls. That's the idea. Yes you can poke holes in it (and people do), but if you think that's communism, you haven't seen communism.
- rootusrootus 3y ago30 people, for 2 years? Just as meaningless as every other time someone has done this. It would need to be for more than 30 people, and funded indefinitely. People are not going to make life changes based on a mere 2 years of guaranteed income.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y agoSomething that just crossed my mind... I've always been a proponent of a decent minimum wage, because I've argued that eliminating minimum wage would result in a race to the bottom on wages as people become more desperate for work, and the standard of living would hit rock bottom for the people at the bottom. But with UBI, the dynamic changes. If UBI pays for your basic necessities, people only need to work if they want something better than the bare minimum. The power dynamic has changed, and now all employees have leverage. No longer is it "The job pays next to nothing, but if I want a least two meals a day, I still gotta do it", and instead is "I don't need this job to survive, so they need to make it worthwhile." In short, I would happily be in favor of dropping minimum wage laws entirely if UBI was implemented and was enough to survive off of.
- 0xbadc0de5 3y agoWho pays the taxes that fund UBI? What happens to that economic activity under UBI? Who grows the food? Who maintains civilization if a not-insignificant percentage of it decide they can't be bothered.
- LordShredda 3y agoA lot of people would want more and therefore stay with their job. Society won't just simply throw their paperwork out the window and become hermits.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y agoTheoretically, automation takes over much of the manual labor. Let's be real here. We absolutely have the technology to automate most farming jobs. We just need to build the machines to do it. But right now, it's cheaper to pay a bunch of illegal immigrant workers [0] cash under the table to pick crops than to hire a team of robotics and automation experts to develop a robot that does it. The money they save in labor costs can be taxed to fund UBI. Think long term here. Given enough time, most manual jobs can and will be automated. UBI will be a necessity as unemployment goes up as jobs are lost to automation. We're probably still 20+ years away from the tipping point, but it WILL happen. [0] 41% of farmworkers are not authorized to work in the USA: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor/
- notact 3y agoI don't understand what conclusions you can draw from an experiment with a predefined termination date like this. If I were part of this group, I would realize that in two years, I am back to supporting myself, so I would keep working the entire time. If instead I knew my basic needs would be covered for free for the rest of my life, I might just quit my job and enjoy life. As someone else posted here a long time ago, a better way to estimate the effects of UBI on productivity is to study people living off a lottery annuity of a similar allowance.
- pfannkuchen 3y agoI feel like not everyone plans into the future in detail, and a lot of people make serious life choices using emotion. They might actually get a lot of useful data (though in that case it would be quite mean or exploitative towards the sample group).
- SilkRoadie 3y agoThe sample size of thirty people is going to be too small and the two year duration is too short. I expect that participants will be happier than average and feel more secure. On the flip side they will continue working and their lives will not change much because they can see the payments will be terminated reasonably soon. Even with the small sample size they are splitting the trial between two locations and trying to make it representative (whatever that means). This seems to raise the risk of a lot of anomalies. I struggle to see how any meaningful conclusions would come out of this.
- joebob42 3y agoOne thing I don't understand: I only spend about 25-30 a year, despite making a devs salary. I think 45-50 ubi is the point where I'd just leave the workforce.
- oschleic 3y ago30 people.. completely pointless, the behavior of the participants would never match actual reality. Truly universal UBI would just cause price increases for everything and will never be possible in a resource scarce society. Sure you might be able to afford necessities for a few months until the market adjusts..
- awaythrow483 3y agoStartling conclusion: The 30 people who received a substantial amount of free money liked getting free money. Follow up conclusion: Therefore we should give everyone cash.
- emmacharp 3y agoEvery time I stumble upon a thread like this one, multiple posters react with "but everybody will stop working!". I always find this reaction to be curious. Why are we working now if, only by not being afraid of starvation and homelessness, we shall stop doing so? It seems to me only two conclusions follow: 1. It means that the actual labor market isn't free since we are essentially coerced into exchanging by fear of being destitute. 2. It means that the free market does not operate properly since if it was, the price of labor would adjust to find a new equilibrium where employers and employees satisfied by the exchange. UBI would not induce mass idleness. It would rebalance labor relations.