11 ms·

Why is the goal to get people to quit their jobs and get a nice apartment? Isn't it supposed to be a minimum base level of support? Why do we keep moving the g

by bko 2y ago

Why is the goal to get people to quit their jobs and get a nice apartment? Isn't it supposed to be a minimum base level of support? Why do we keep moving the goal posts? And if everyone quits their job and lives in a nice apartment, where is this money going to come from? The problem with welfare today is that its a disincentive to work. Start working, you lose your transfer payments. A lot of people are stuck in this trap and don't want to start working, forsaking valuable on the job training and socialization that will hurt them in the long run. That's where universal part comes in

DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
> The problem with welfare today is that its a disincentive to work No. The reason you say that is because you're young and you believe what you've heard. You will soon cease to be the former and then presumably, likely, stop to do the latter. People want to work, they want to be useful. And yes, if I support you but threaten to stop supporting you as soon as you get to work for money—suddenly working for money looks less attractive. Sure, natural. There's nothing wrong with that. But if I support you no matter whether you add money to that yourself, then that is not detrimental to your willingness to work, it just gives you that much more leeway to choose a suitable occupation.
- ahahahahah 2y ago
  That's a rather smarmy response for someone who clearly lacks reading comprehension. I'd recommend: (1) look up the definition of "disincentive". The parent didn't say anything about people not wanting to work or not wanting to be useful. And even then, you actually agreed about it being the disincentive ("if I support you but threaten to stop supporting you as soon as you get to work for money—suddenly working for money looks less attractive"). (2) understand the meaning of the phrase "The problem with X today is Y". It's very clearly not saying that Y is a problem with X, in fact, it's implying that there are other approaches to X that don't have problem Y.
  - DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
    ?so?
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  i mean this study clearly shows that people work fewer hours and increase leisure time when given money. i don’t think that is a bad thing necessarily but i think we can be relatively confident of the empirical reality of the effect (at least in the short-term) for quantities of money like this?
  - roughly 2y ago
    It shows they work 1.5 hours less per week. That’s one day off every six weeks, and I’d frankly bet that’s going to taking care of all the other uncompensated labor a person must do to survive. I don’t think I’d draw a lot of conclusions about people’s preference for work from a ~4% reduction in working hours following a roughly 20% increase in income.
    - whimsicalism 2y ago
      > I’d frankly bet that’s going to taking care of all the other uncompensated labor a person must do to survive Good thing they had the participants complete a time journal so we can see that it mostly went towards leisure time and socializing. Again, I'm not making a moral judgement here - for a similar amount of money relative to my salary I would also shift towards more leisure at the margin. > I don’t think I’d draw a lot of conclusions The point of the experiment is precisely so we can draw generalizable conclusions about how money around this quantity impacts people's behaviors/incentives. Many welfare programs offer similar quantities of saving. I think your reasoning is a bit motivated - this is a pretty good social science experiment that was very careful to preregister their analysis.
      - roughly 2y ago
        > I think your reasoning is a bit motivated - this is a pretty good social science experiment that was very careful to preregister their analysis. I’ll cop to that, but there are a lot of people commenting here who seem to be latching on to the relatively small decrease in working hours as a primary takeaway, and I’ve seen enough motivated reasoning around this topic elsewhere to have a theory on why they’re doing so. And, for what it’s worth, I’m not trying to critique the study itself or the conditions it was performed under.
- valicord 2y ago
  > if I support you but threaten to stop supporting you as soon as you get to work for money—suddenly working for money looks less attractive So you agree that "the problem with welfare today is that its a disincentive to work"?
  - Supermancho 2y ago
    No, that's not "the problem". Framing dissatisfaction with existing solutions as if there is a singular problem is not constructive.
  - QuarterReptile 2y ago
    It's probably worse as a disincentive to marriage than as a disincentive to work.
- fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
  How do you know how old he is?
- WheatMillington 2y ago
  You haven't met enough deadbeats in your life. Trust me, there's a virtually limitless number of them, and they very much do not want to work.
  - azemetre 2y ago
    You need to provide hard numbers because welfare fraud is typically less than single digits. Going by “vibes” is pretty useless, especially since the government has been the largest force in reducing poverty in western nations.
    - selfmodruntime 2y ago
      The problem with this is that there's little way to get any realistic data here. Of course the number of people polled that say they're a deadbeat will be low.
  - eecc 2y ago
    And so what? I'm ok subsidising 100 deadbeats scraping by if I can score a couple performers with stellar ROI. This is YCombinator's blog after all, isn't it?
- physicsguy 2y ago
  People say it because they experience similar cliffs in the tax system even with higher incomes. I live in the UK. Currently my marginal tax rate is something like 65% because for every £100 I earn, I pay 40% income tax, 12% national insurance, 9% student loan (which functions more like a tax here than a real loan), and I lose something called child benefit when I earn more. So yeah, I want to earn more, but it's pretty marginal returns for the extra work, stress and responsibility until I've totally lost child benefit (lost totally at £80k) and then I start to keep more of the income again. And then at £100k you lose the government support for childcare, you start having to pay interest on all savings accounts, and so between £100k and £120k you can be worse off than before rather than better off, especially if you have multiple children. That's not to say that the incentives are the same on the low end of the salary scale but you can see why people might think it.
  - mmaniac 2y ago
    The entire tax regime in the UK is outright designed to inhibit class mobility and penalise hard work. The 60% tax trap and other benefit cliffs over 100k are just punishing. At the same time the capitalist class enjoy a cool 20% haircut on capital returns.
- sensanaty 2y ago
  The only reason I work is because I have to. I hate nothing more than the daily bullshit meetings and sprint reviews and all that other useless life-sucking crap. And I have it good, most people don't have the privilege of complaining from an AC'd home office while they tap away at a keyboard. No, most people work because that's the only way they get food on the table and survive, not because of some hilariously out of touch notion of menial work being fulfilling
  - azthecx 2y ago
    If that's your perspective it's easy to assume that it's the same for most people, but really reality is probably more gray. Outside of some genuinely horrible low class (paying) jobs when you talk to other people you will almost always find that there's always things they love and things they hate about their jobs, and they just sit on a spectrum. If you're really so disenfranchised from your job as to truly hate everything you do about it, what's stopping you from changing it? Like you mentioned, you have a previliegeld position you could find another far less corporate more immediate reward job that would make you happier at work. Or if you just accepted a worse fitting job for better pay, then it's not really your job's fault, you decided to sacrifice work happiness for other wealth, status or personal related happiness.
  - literallycancer 2y ago
    Working on your own projects is also work. There's no reason why the term work should refer exclusively to working for an employer.
  - rytor718 2y ago
    Agreed and what you say is true for many, if not most workers. I think this brings up something we're all a bit reluctant to add to this conversation about UBI: the reason to do it at all. As practiced, capitalism is just high stakes musical chairs. Everyone, rich and poor, works fervently to ensure they aren't the last ones standing with no chair. UBI asks: what if everyone always has a chair? Its a very unsettling question, one can almost hear the record scratch when its posed. So unsettling, we start asking who deserves a chair! And suddenly we're not talking about capitalism OR UBI at all. This is something else entirely: class. The allegedly unwashed lazy hordes versus the Ultra Clean Society of the Diamond Shower Faucets. The primary incentive for anyone to work (as we understand the term today), is to maintain food and shelter above all else. That's it. Proponents of UBI want everyone to have food and shelter, be less of a slave. Opponents worry about whether we can afford to give everyone a chair.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jajko 2y ago
I love the "nice" part of apartment requirement, like some UN Geneva charter of basic human rights declaration. Especially when everybody should have it, like you can clone "nice apartments" ad infinitum so everybody has >150m2, beautiful terrace with view on lake or mountains, and of course while being in or very close to city center. I wonder what other basic "nice" stuff is a must have, we can go on for a long time. The pipe dreams some people have... I mean its fine, you do you, nobody else in this world actually cares. But thats not how you actually achieve anything in life, in any system out there, rather exact opposite.
- lucianbr 2y ago
  Maybe by "nice" they just meant "not rat-infested, not cockroach-infested, the roof does not leak, it's not unlivably hot in the summer etc". Problems with which plenty of people on this planet still contend. Your comment sure sounds like mind-reading.
- literallycancer 2y ago
  Most American housing is 2x4 garden sheds where if you stomp a bit harder the floorboards are gonna dislodge and you'll literally see the mud beneath your house. Also, most people in California can't afford to buy a house, let alone something up to current building codes (which are ridiculously lenient compared to Europe). So yeah, "nice" probably just means something that wasn't built in 1970. Imagine they said "liveable" if it works better for you.
_the_inflator 2y ago
A definition and common understanding are part of the problem/challenge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income It is complex. Although the label UBI suggests a good thing, I believe we should eliminate the term "universal," at least. Humanity has always dealt with a shortage of resources and their allocation. What is certain is that no amount of UBI will fix this human condition. There will always be differences (not only economic but ideological), and people will try to compensate for them. Rinse and repeat.
dylan604 2y ago
> Why is the goal to get people to quit their jobs and get a nice apartment? because that's the way things are in scifi like Star Trek. people want to make life imitate art.
- the_other 2y ago
  You write like rhat’s a bad thing.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    I just provided an answer to a question. Your projection of good/bad is on you
jimt1234 2y ago
Back in my college speech class, a woman gave a presentation basically supporting the "welfare today is a disincentive to work" myth, with emphasis on "today" (or current), while totally destroying the notion that welfare recipients don't "want" to work. She was a stay-at-home mom with 2 kids, her husband commit suicide after serving in Iraq and then being pushed out of the military (this was the 90s when the US military was actively drawing down). She basically said that the current welfare system (in the 90s, in California) didn't allow a way to slowly move off welfare. She said she had many offers for part-time work, and work that didn't earn a lot of money, but both had potential for her to eventually be promoted to full-time or to make more money than welfare paid her. But she said there was no way to do this: welfare was either all or nothing. But most of all, she dispelled the myth that she was some sort of leech that didn't want to work. She wanted to work, but the welfare system didn't allow it. Your comment didn't necessarily imply it, but a lot of the discourse these days tries to imply (or directly claims) that recipients are the problem, they're a bunch of lazy bums that don't want to contribute. That's just not true.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  I wish somebody could come up with a framework whereby we drop people’s incentives, welfare, taxes, etc… into, I dunno, a sigmoid or something. This way politicians can do what they want to do: talk about, like, simple additions and subtractions. But then secretly it goes into a function that smooths it out, and makes sure we don’t provide big stupid cliffs to drop huge life changes into people’s laps (well my analogy clearly needs work but you get what I mean, I hope).
- willcipriano 2y ago
  Could have worked under the table. Babysitting would make sense in particular if you are available during the day and have children of your own that you are already watching. A lot of poor people are really good at convincing themselves they have no choice but to do the thing they wanted to do anyway. It wasn't until I broke free of this attitude was I able to escape myself.
  - jrmg 2y ago
ilaksh 2y ago
Good point about making it unconditional. I meant more like for an opportunity to pause work or reduce work to find a better job, or study, or start a business. And I should not have said nice apartment but rather standard apartment. Many lower cost apartments are substandard: pest problems, poor heating/AC, no hookups for washer/dryer, crime-ridden area, etc.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tivert 2y ago
> Why is the goal to get people to quit their jobs and get a nice apartment? > Isn't it supposed to be a minimum base level of support? Why do we keep moving the goal posts? Ultimately, the whole point of UBI is to head off political objections to automating away most jobs, so the tech barons can pursue the technology to do that unimpeded (at least until it's too late). "Minimum base level of support" is basically the Terrafoam welfare warehouses from Manna (https://marshallbrain.com/manna https://marshallbrain.com/manna).
- ahazred8ta 2y ago
  Ditto the drab 'Modicum' welfare system of Disch's '334'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/334_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/334_(novel) (set in the 2020s, no less)

by bko 2y ago

DemocracyFTW2 2y ago

> The problem with welfare today is that its a disincentive to work No. The reason you say that is because you're young and you believe what you've heard. You will soon cease to be the former and then presumably, likely, stop to do the latter. People want to work, they want to be useful. And yes, if I support you but threaten to stop supporting you as soon as you get to work for money—suddenly working for money looks less attractive. Sure, natural. There's nothing wrong with that. But if I support you no matter whether you add money to that yourself, then that is not detrimental to your willingness to work, it just gives you that much more leeway to choose a suitable occupation.

ahahahahah 2y ago
That's a rather smarmy response for someone who clearly lacks reading comprehension. I'd recommend: (1) look up the definition of "disincentive". The parent didn't say anything about people not wanting to work or not wanting to be useful. And even then, you actually agreed about it being the disincentive ("if I support you but threaten to stop supporting you as soon as you get to work for money—suddenly working for money looks less attractive"). (2) understand the meaning of the phrase "The problem with X today is Y". It's very clearly not saying that Y is a problem with X, in fact, it's implying that there are other approaches to X that don't have problem Y.
- DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
  ?so?
whimsicalism 2y ago
i mean this study clearly shows that people work fewer hours and increase leisure time when given money. i don’t think that is a bad thing necessarily but i think we can be relatively confident of the empirical reality of the effect (at least in the short-term) for quantities of money like this?
- roughly 2y ago
  It shows they work 1.5 hours less per week. That’s one day off every six weeks, and I’d frankly bet that’s going to taking care of all the other uncompensated labor a person must do to survive. I don’t think I’d draw a lot of conclusions about people’s preference for work from a ~4% reduction in working hours following a roughly 20% increase in income.
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    > I’d frankly bet that’s going to taking care of all the other uncompensated labor a person must do to survive Good thing they had the participants complete a time journal so we can see that it mostly went towards leisure time and socializing. Again, I'm not making a moral judgement here - for a similar amount of money relative to my salary I would also shift towards more leisure at the margin. > I don’t think I’d draw a lot of conclusions The point of the experiment is precisely so we can draw generalizable conclusions about how money around this quantity impacts people's behaviors/incentives. Many welfare programs offer similar quantities of saving. I think your reasoning is a bit motivated - this is a pretty good social science experiment that was very careful to preregister their analysis.
    - roughly 2y ago
      > I think your reasoning is a bit motivated - this is a pretty good social science experiment that was very careful to preregister their analysis. I’ll cop to that, but there are a lot of people commenting here who seem to be latching on to the relatively small decrease in working hours as a primary takeaway, and I’ve seen enough motivated reasoning around this topic elsewhere to have a theory on why they’re doing so. And, for what it’s worth, I’m not trying to critique the study itself or the conditions it was performed under.
valicord 2y ago
> if I support you but threaten to stop supporting you as soon as you get to work for money—suddenly working for money looks less attractive So you agree that "the problem with welfare today is that its a disincentive to work"?
- Supermancho 2y ago
  No, that's not "the problem". Framing dissatisfaction with existing solutions as if there is a singular problem is not constructive.
- QuarterReptile 2y ago
  It's probably worse as a disincentive to marriage than as a disincentive to work.
fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
How do you know how old he is?
WheatMillington 2y ago
You haven't met enough deadbeats in your life. Trust me, there's a virtually limitless number of them, and they very much do not want to work.
- azemetre 2y ago
  You need to provide hard numbers because welfare fraud is typically less than single digits. Going by “vibes” is pretty useless, especially since the government has been the largest force in reducing poverty in western nations.
  - selfmodruntime 2y ago
    The problem with this is that there's little way to get any realistic data here. Of course the number of people polled that say they're a deadbeat will be low.
- eecc 2y ago
  And so what? I'm ok subsidising 100 deadbeats scraping by if I can score a couple performers with stellar ROI. This is YCombinator's blog after all, isn't it?
physicsguy 2y ago
People say it because they experience similar cliffs in the tax system even with higher incomes. I live in the UK. Currently my marginal tax rate is something like 65% because for every £100 I earn, I pay 40% income tax, 12% national insurance, 9% student loan (which functions more like a tax here than a real loan), and I lose something called child benefit when I earn more. So yeah, I want to earn more, but it's pretty marginal returns for the extra work, stress and responsibility until I've totally lost child benefit (lost totally at £80k) and then I start to keep more of the income again. And then at £100k you lose the government support for childcare, you start having to pay interest on all savings accounts, and so between £100k and £120k you can be worse off than before rather than better off, especially if you have multiple children. That's not to say that the incentives are the same on the low end of the salary scale but you can see why people might think it.
- mmaniac 2y ago
  The entire tax regime in the UK is outright designed to inhibit class mobility and penalise hard work. The 60% tax trap and other benefit cliffs over 100k are just punishing. At the same time the capitalist class enjoy a cool 20% haircut on capital returns.
sensanaty 2y ago
The only reason I work is because I have to. I hate nothing more than the daily bullshit meetings and sprint reviews and all that other useless life-sucking crap. And I have it good, most people don't have the privilege of complaining from an AC'd home office while they tap away at a keyboard. No, most people work because that's the only way they get food on the table and survive, not because of some hilariously out of touch notion of menial work being fulfilling
- azthecx 2y ago
  If that's your perspective it's easy to assume that it's the same for most people, but really reality is probably more gray. Outside of some genuinely horrible low class (paying) jobs when you talk to other people you will almost always find that there's always things they love and things they hate about their jobs, and they just sit on a spectrum. If you're really so disenfranchised from your job as to truly hate everything you do about it, what's stopping you from changing it? Like you mentioned, you have a previliegeld position you could find another far less corporate more immediate reward job that would make you happier at work. Or if you just accepted a worse fitting job for better pay, then it's not really your job's fault, you decided to sacrifice work happiness for other wealth, status or personal related happiness.
- literallycancer 2y ago
  Working on your own projects is also work. There's no reason why the term work should refer exclusively to working for an employer.
- rytor718 2y ago
  Agreed and what you say is true for many, if not most workers. I think this brings up something we're all a bit reluctant to add to this conversation about UBI: the reason to do it at all. As practiced, capitalism is just high stakes musical chairs. Everyone, rich and poor, works fervently to ensure they aren't the last ones standing with no chair. UBI asks: what if everyone always has a chair? Its a very unsettling question, one can almost hear the record scratch when its posed. So unsettling, we start asking who deserves a chair! And suddenly we're not talking about capitalism OR UBI at all. This is something else entirely: class. The allegedly unwashed lazy hordes versus the Ultra Clean Society of the Diamond Shower Faucets. The primary incentive for anyone to work (as we understand the term today), is to maintain food and shelter above all else. That's it. Proponents of UBI want everyone to have food and shelter, be less of a slave. Opponents worry about whether we can afford to give everyone a chair.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jajko 2y ago

I love the "nice" part of apartment requirement, like some UN Geneva charter of basic human rights declaration. Especially when everybody should have it, like you can clone "nice apartments" ad infinitum so everybody has >150m2, beautiful terrace with view on lake or mountains, and of course while being in or very close to city center. I wonder what other basic "nice" stuff is a must have, we can go on for a long time. The pipe dreams some people have... I mean its fine, you do you, nobody else in this world actually cares. But thats not how you actually achieve anything in life, in any system out there, rather exact opposite.

lucianbr 2y ago
Maybe by "nice" they just meant "not rat-infested, not cockroach-infested, the roof does not leak, it's not unlivably hot in the summer etc". Problems with which plenty of people on this planet still contend. Your comment sure sounds like mind-reading.
literallycancer 2y ago
Most American housing is 2x4 garden sheds where if you stomp a bit harder the floorboards are gonna dislodge and you'll literally see the mud beneath your house. Also, most people in California can't afford to buy a house, let alone something up to current building codes (which are ridiculously lenient compared to Europe). So yeah, "nice" probably just means something that wasn't built in 1970. Imagine they said "liveable" if it works better for you.

_the_inflator 2y ago

A definition and common understanding are part of the problem/challenge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income It is complex. Although the label UBI suggests a good thing, I believe we should eliminate the term "universal," at least. Humanity has always dealt with a shortage of resources and their allocation. What is certain is that no amount of UBI will fix this human condition. There will always be differences (not only economic but ideological), and people will try to compensate for them. Rinse and repeat.

dylan604 2y ago

> Why is the goal to get people to quit their jobs and get a nice apartment? because that's the way things are in scifi like Star Trek. people want to make life imitate art.

the_other 2y ago
You write like rhat’s a bad thing.
- dylan604 2y ago
  I just provided an answer to a question. Your projection of good/bad is on you

jimt1234 2y ago

Back in my college speech class, a woman gave a presentation basically supporting the "welfare today is a disincentive to work" myth, with emphasis on "today" (or current), while totally destroying the notion that welfare recipients don't "want" to work. She was a stay-at-home mom with 2 kids, her husband commit suicide after serving in Iraq and then being pushed out of the military (this was the 90s when the US military was actively drawing down). She basically said that the current welfare system (in the 90s, in California) didn't allow a way to slowly move off welfare. She said she had many offers for part-time work, and work that didn't earn a lot of money, but both had potential for her to eventually be promoted to full-time or to make more money than welfare paid her. But she said there was no way to do this: welfare was either all or nothing. But most of all, she dispelled the myth that she was some sort of leech that didn't want to work. She wanted to work, but the welfare system didn't allow it. Your comment didn't necessarily imply it, but a lot of the discourse these days tries to imply (or directly claims) that recipients are the problem, they're a bunch of lazy bums that don't want to contribute. That's just not true.

bee_rider 2y ago
I wish somebody could come up with a framework whereby we drop people’s incentives, welfare, taxes, etc… into, I dunno, a sigmoid or something. This way politicians can do what they want to do: talk about, like, simple additions and subtractions. But then secretly it goes into a function that smooths it out, and makes sure we don’t provide big stupid cliffs to drop huge life changes into people’s laps (well my analogy clearly needs work but you get what I mean, I hope).
willcipriano 2y ago
Could have worked under the table. Babysitting would make sense in particular if you are available during the day and have children of your own that you are already watching. A lot of poor people are really good at convincing themselves they have no choice but to do the thing they wanted to do anyway. It wasn't until I broke free of this attitude was I able to escape myself.
- jrmg 2y ago

ilaksh 2y ago

Good point about making it unconditional. I meant more like for an opportunity to pause work or reduce work to find a better job, or study, or start a business. And I should not have said nice apartment but rather standard apartment. Many lower cost apartments are substandard: pest problems, poor heating/AC, no hookups for washer/dryer, crime-ridden area, etc.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

tivert 2y ago

> Why is the goal to get people to quit their jobs and get a nice apartment? > Isn't it supposed to be a minimum base level of support? Why do we keep moving the goal posts? Ultimately, the whole point of UBI is to head off political objections to automating away most jobs, so the tech barons can pursue the technology to do that unimpeded (at least until it's too late). "Minimum base level of support" is basically the Terrafoam welfare warehouses from Manna (https://marshallbrain.com/manna https://marshallbrain.com/manna).

ahazred8ta 2y ago
Ditto the drab 'Modicum' welfare system of Disch's '334'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/334_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/334_(novel) (set in the 2020s, no less)