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This kind of thing pops up now and again but the psychology is completely different to if basic income was actually universal and expected to continue in the lo

This kind of thing pops up now and again but the psychology is completely different to if basic income was actually universal and expected to continue in the long-term. Of course people don't quit their jobs and careers because they are part of a small group enrolled in a 3-year scientific study. Human behaviour is non-linear. The study doesn't cover the likely feedback effects on the broader economy that a universal rollout would have (increase in the money supply) or the broader socio-cultural changes that would likely accompany it. In short: scale matters for this kind of thing. Some things just can't be tested ahead of time empirically.

bravura 2y ago
Quantity has a quality all of its own.
missedthecue 2y ago
yeah, there are basically three questions people have for UBI. 1. Does it cause inflation 2. What is the impact on employment/productivity 3. Can we afford to tax ourselves to pay ourselves in a way that makes sense? These studies answer none of these.
- oulipo 2y ago
  Well the study at least answers your second point, it shows that people are enjoying their work more, and that they change jobs more often (ie take more risks) and stay as employed as before and #3 at least as already been well modelled economically, UBI replaces many other welfare programs, so we can definitely afford it
  - DennisP 2y ago
    And #3 implies that it's not going to cause inflation, any more than those other welfare programs do now. In general, as long as we're funding it with taxes instead of by printing money, it's not going to cause any extra inflation.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > Well the study at least answers your second point, it shows that people are enjoying their work more, and that they change jobs more often (ie take more risks) and stay as employed as before As GGP said, this doesn't compare. There's even nothing magically non-linear about it: people stay employed, because they know the UBI study will only last a few years, after which they'll need to get back to normal. It makes no sense to interrupt your career for it, as the "hole in your CV" will just turn into a severe and compounding disadvantage in lost years and experience.
    - HenryBemis 2y ago
      It's not just that. I fear tha UBI will be 'frozen in time', so let's say it's something insanely generous, EUR 5000 per month. After that happens, every month we will have a record inflation, and soon enough the EUR 5000 will rent you Harry Potter's staircase-'flat' and 3 pizzas. The only way I see this being sustainable is get as far as possible from the big cities, buy a tiny piece of land, by a durable tiny home, buy solar panels, get a tablet with all Gutenberg books, and find a soulmate that will follow you to that journey. No kids, no private schools, no parties, no nothing. Everything will be swallowed by inflation.
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Yup, I 100% agree. This is my worry too. And it goes beyond real estate market and landlords - they are the obvious infinitely deep money sinkholes of society, but even if housing magically became free and available to everyone, I believe the sudden inflation would happen anyway. I believe this to be a fundamental feature of free market economy in general. It's something I started realizing many years ago, and thought about a lot ever since; in the last year, I distilled that belief into a concise phrase I now use for this: The market constantly adjusts to keep the average disposable income to zero. Except now I realized that "average" is the wrong measure here, I should be saying "median", and also I've been mistakenly using the term "disposable income" (which actually means just after-tax income) to refer to "discretionary income" (what you're left with after covering taxes, bills, and essentials). Which leads me to the New and Better, Updated, Version 2.0 of my economic theory: The market constantly adjusts to keep median discretionary income near zero. I'd imagine this is an obvious thing that's already been named 100 years ago, but so far my research only pointed me to things like "neutrality of money", and some specific examples of my statement holding, yet nothing that covers it entirely. (EDIT: in the unlikely case I'm not an idiot, and that this phrasing was not used/named before, I welcome credit; inquiries from the Nobel Foundation should be directed to my e-mail address, which is in my profile.)
  - jay_kyburz 2y ago
    If somebody offered me 1200 GBP a month, tax free, no strings attached, guaranteed for the rest of my life, there is no way I would continue working for somebody else. I would tinker around with open source and pet projects for the rest of my life. That's almost twice the aged pension here in Australia. (550 GBP) I guess I would also need some iron clad guarantee that the cost of living would not skyrocket.
- xvedejas 2y ago
  I'm personally most worried about increases in general income levels being soaked up by real estate holders. It's what we've seen happen in the SF bay area rents in response to tech fortunes. I don't see UBI actually increasing welfare much without a tax on land value to make landholding less profitable and redirecting the value of land into the UBI fund.
  - gnfedhjmm2 2y ago
    “Based on nothing I disagree”
  - mediaman 2y ago
    This only seems to be an issue if the marginal cost of building is too high to expand supply, though, right? Otherwise if people have more money, they bid up housing, then new stuff gets built, and supply profits decline. Of course, restricting supply is a problem. I also think this logic might break down in tightly restricted areas that are already vertically built out - Manhattan, for example, because costs per housing unit tend to follow a U curve with respect to height, where they decline with density but start increasing again at very high density, but that's not an issue in most places.
  - mgfist 2y ago
    This can broadly be alleviated by regulations that make it far cheaper and easier to build. Currently, demand is the only access by which housing markets are dictated in heavily NIMBY areas like SF. Supply is an underused level due to cost and permitting issues.
  - serviceberry 2y ago
    I don't think capital has any special attachment to real estate specifically. It's just that we have policies that essentially require your money to be invested into something (because inflation); and we turned real estate into a safe investment asset through policies that create perpetual scarcity. You can probably come up with policies that penalize real estate investments, but (a) it will just cause the investors to chase some other asset class, instead of redistributing wealth; (b) unless scarcity is addressed, it's unlikely that housing prices are going to drop. Landlords extract profits from the assets they hold, but they don't cause there to be fewer homes or apartments available.
- jsdwarf 2y ago
  You could study various subsidy regimes during the COVID-19 pandemic to answer this question. Some regimes subsidized resouces like energy, whereas other regimes provided something like an universal basic income (ubi) to small businesses/freelancers who were unable to serve their customers during lockdown. Austria was on the ubi side and we had huge problems with Inflation afterwards
  - LaundroMat 2y ago
    I don't know whether you can tie that inflation to ubi-like measures(alone). The whole world suffered high inflation, not in the least because of the global disruption of the supply chain.
- lawlessone 2y ago
  >1. Does it cause inflation Our current system has inflation baked in, so im not sure how big an issue it is, so much as how much inflation?
- benmoose 2y ago
  We need to get serious about wealth taxes. The amount of money locked up in assets and land is staggering and has been under taxed for far too long.
  - y-curious 2y ago
    I agree with the sentiment, but it matters very much how it's implemented. You would need to find a way to keep the money in your country, while also taxing more. It's actually very complicated, but yes, I agree with the notion.
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    Said assets and land are already being used though. It's just a case of people wanting to "redistribute" them.
- some1else 2y ago
  My questions are more along the lines of: - Does it liberate people from meaningless employment? - Does it give a sufficient platform to people to bootstrap their own trade? - Does it give people the runway for meaningful creation / artistic self-actualization?
- buu700 2y ago
  Agreed. It's better than no data, but I don't really see what a study like this can hope to prove one way or another. Giving a handful of people free money isn't UBI any more than the lottery is UBI. It doesn't provide any information about the macroeconomic effects of an actual universal income, or about how a lifetime guarantee of continued payments would impact behavior. Personally, I think the necessity and viability of UBI will become apparent sooner than most would expect. If AI and related fields continue to advance at their current pace, at some point we'll be able to observe a clear trend toward an eventual government budget surplus paired with a mass unemployment crisis. Implementing a UBI or similar measure during that transitional period will be the only way to avoid a lot of unnecessary pain and societal upheaval. This won't cause excess inflation because the payments will be backed by real economic output; the payments will only serve to keep demand in line with supply. Eventually, we'll get to the point where a UBI with annual raises and a balanced budget can coexist. A pessimistic outlook would be that this heralds the end of human innovation and ingenuity; I personally predict that it kicks off a renaissance of entrepreneurship, invention, and scientific breakthroughs that at least matches the relative progress of the 20th century.
- stego-tech 2y ago
  I argue the studies don't have to answer these questions, because we already have the (uncomfortable) answers. > 1. Does it cause inflation On its own, yes, it would create inflation if rolled out globally. However, this is why serious advocates of UBI also point out that we need policies that ensure it isn't turned into a wealth pump into the upper/ruling classes. This entails things like rent, margin, and price controls on necessities like food, shelter, healthcare, education, and transportation, which also requires substantial public investment in those areas to deter or discourage privatization of those necessities. In other words, it means pissing off every landlord, upscale grocer, private hospital, utility company, telecom, private university, rideshare company, rail company, and Taxi owner for the sake of the public good. > 2. What is the impact on employment/productivity Generally speaking, humans want to do something productive with their time - it's the definition of productivity that varies from person to person. Those who think solely in economic output will say that negative-profitability employment isn't of value, even if that output has knock-on positive effects in the economy (such as the disparaging compensation for teachers and first responders despite the immense value they create in the long run). It's also why people sneer at the homeless or panhandlers as being "problematic" and "undeserving" of assistance for failing to "pull themselves up [by their bootstraps]." In reality, taking into account the whole picture, these sorts of individuals could (and studies show, often do) contribute to society better if they had support structures in place that prioritized long-term stability instead of quick KPIs for grant money. It could even be argued that UBI enabling humans to stay home and not work is itself a profitable exercise, since it removes friction from systems that those individuals might create by being forced to exist and interact with modern society and its lack of safeguards. Not only that, but the productivity gains could likely increase as we can finally eliminate "bullshit jobs" and give people the safety nets needed to start their own businesses instead - more restaurants, service experts, inventors, researchers, teachers, and other jobs that are high risk/low reward in the current system, wouldn't be in an economy with UBI and associated policies to provide for necessities and essentials. > 3. Can we afford to tax ourselves to pay ourselves in a way that makes sense? We can, but this is arguably the hardest opposition to surmount because it fundamentally means higher taxes on everyone, and that's a bitter medicine nobody wants to swallow. Countries with successful social safety nets have higher tax rates, but also higher quality of life as a result. Unfortunately, the current technocrats and their sycophants (not to mention their industrial predecessors and their decedents) have managed to convince a plurality of powerful people that the world would be perfect if everyone just worked harder and became billionaires themselves so we'd have no more poor people and thus no need for taxation in principle - a fantasy so high and lofty it makes the MCU look plausibly accurate. It would mean building a society of high taxes, rigid policies, and a massive reduction in (or outright elimination of) loopholes for wealth preservation, especially across generations. It'd mean punishing hoarding of wealth, as that would (rightly) signal exploitation rather than success. These are things most people simply aren't ready for, because they still believe themselves to be one lottery ticket, one inheritance, one startup, one IPO, or one crypto boom away from being billionaires themselves, and don't want to accept that the outcome of the 99% is to work for the rest of their lives before dying in destitution of some form under the current system - a depressing reality to be sure, but all the more reason to change it. So there you have it. If all you look at is the current system as-is and shoehorning UBI into it, then obviously you have a slam dunk case for why it's a bad thing. UBI advocates like myself, however, acknowledge that it's merely one component in a larger transformation of society itself towards more equitable outcomes, one where colorful pieces of paper are inherently devalued for necessities like food, shelter, healthcare, education, and transportation, while increased in value for actual luxuries. It's an inversion of our present society for the betterment of all, and that's why it's incompatible with the questions you raise above (which seek to preserve a broken status quo).
numpad0 2y ago
will it become a capped negative sales tax, in a way? I don't see how amount of currency smaller than individual UBI amount make tangible sense under its presence.
rsoto2 2y ago
It's funny, people like you will say a study is too small and focused to be worthwhile. But then we have the case of Alaska, an entire state receiving a yearly stipend(basic income). And the same type of people will say well it's too broad you can't possibly pinpoint any direct effects. https://www.ktoo.org/2015/02/20/alaska-tops-gallups-index-well/ https://www.ktoo.org/2015/02/20/alaska-tops-gallups-index-we... Science is not made for perfection and many studies are _not possible_ it doesn't mean there's nothing useful to gain from it for policy makers. It's also simpler to study smaller groups than effects on entire countries.
- exe34 2y ago
  > “It’s awesome! I wasn’t even aware that we were even close to being number 1, so seeing that was really nice to know,” Brown said It seems to have come as a shock to a lot of them to find out they were so happy.
- deleted 2y ago
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- floxy 2y ago
  Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend for 2024: $1,702, or $141.83/month https://pfd.alaska.gov/ https://pfd.alaska.gov/
oulipo 2y ago
Perhaps, but they have actual arguments for their claim, and you have just hypotheses. Scientific studies like those are the best approximation we can have to a full rollout. So perhaps results won't be exactly the same with a full rollout, but at least they have already taken out the "people will just behave nonsensically / be worse off" hypotheses
James_K 2y ago
> the likely feedback effects on the broader economy that a universal rollout would have It's interesting to describe as "likely" something for which there is no evidence. This is an actively anti-science belief. It seems to me as if you really don't like the idea of UBI and so are saying that, if it actually happened, the effect would be the opposite of what experimental data shows. This is pretty clearly biased. > (increase in the money supply) There is no effect on money supply if this is funded through taxes. > Some things just can't be tested ahead of time empirically. You can gradually expand the pool of people receiving UBI to see how these effects scale. Begin in one city, then increase to a larger region, then do it nationally.
- gmoot 2y ago
  > There is no effect on money supply if this is funded through taxes Of course there is. Suppose we tax Elon several billion dollars. Now, instead of sitting in his money vault, it flows into the economy where it increases demand pressure.
  - James_K 2y ago
    He doesn't have a money vault. He has almost zero cash holdings. If you tax him, then he will have to sell assets to pay for those taxes, which removes money from the economy as that money was being actively spent on his assets. The only situation when money supply changes is if someone has a literal mattress full of cash hidden away. Even if you just have money in a savings account, it acts as a fractional reserve for the banking system meaning that there is a net decrease in money supply when you give it to the government as banks can no longer use it as the backing for loans.
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    To split hairs slightly that is the "velocity of money" (basically how often does the average dollar get spent and passed around per year). Money supply is the total amount of (a given type of) money in existence. But yeah, the effect on inflation is the same.
dalmo3 2y ago
This is the UBI experiment I want to see: The government creates a new currency called $UBI, with the same legal tender status as the official currency for that country ($FIAT). I.e. people can use it to pay taxes, and people are required to accept it when doing commerce. Both currencies exist in parallel. In the true spirit of ubi, everyone is entitled to an equal amount of it, and no one should be worse off by it. So they need to issue the currency new currency to give away. They set up a system so everyone gets the same amount of money, at the same time, for maximum fairness. Everyone's income just goes up, equally. $UBI officially has 1:1 parity to $FIAT, and this parity is used to calculate how much they'll need to "print" out at a given month. Let's say it's living_wage*population_size. That amount can be adjusted once a year by factoring in the government reserves built up exclusively from tax returns. In other words, the monetary base is a known, deterministic quantity. They allow free exchange between $FIAT and $UBI, but the government does not officially exchanges it. They also allow people to set prices to their products and services freely.
- stevage 2y ago
  What is the benefit of all this extra complexity?
mrangle 2y ago
That's right. Community wide Universal Basic Income would cause price rises for shelf goods, negating the intended beneficial effect. As the value of money is always relative to its scarcity. More money held by all individuals always leads to higher prices, because it leads to money being worth less. Life only becomes less expensive when making more money than others. This is a basic dynamic of how money works, at its most fundamental level. Society would need price controls to stop shelf prices from rising, and to maintain the beneficial effect of UBI (being able to afford more goods). At that point shortages are incoming, and UBI income functionally transforms from money to credits for goods. Even if it is still called money. Credits implies a limit on how much goods people are allotted, even if given credits / money to redeem said allotment. The government needs to decide how much in goods each individual is allotted. This is where it gets bad. Communist propaganda practice is to promise that the communist society will allot a maximum amount goods per person out of its GDP, implying an evenly distributed yet relatively well off populace. Visualize a pie that is cut in large slices and completely distributed. The rub is that the government gets to keep any part of the pie that is not distributed, and so its incentive is to distribute the least amount of the pie and the smallest slices. Which is what we see in practice. People given the minimum of their collective production value to sustain their existence. With the government hoarding the rest. Slaves in all but name. The government now has a taste of control over wealth distribution for part of its GDP, which it enacts via entitlement over some production value of work and private business. Whatever production value is left for the private sector economy is now tempting for the government to also take over and minimally distribute in the same manner, because again the government gets to keep much of the money. Private business and employment begin to become dirty words. We live in a World that is dominated by the fundamental nature of money, some would call it a fallen world. Making a low amount of money feels like a slave's existence. However, at least in a free market economy there is a type of escape hatch from that existence should someone figure out how to provide society with relatively more value than others. Whereas in a socialist society, that escape hatch tends to legally close as the years tick by and the personal allotment of goods declines.
- stevage 2y ago
  > That's right. Community wide Universal Basic Income would cause price rises for shelf goods, negating the intended beneficial effect. If that were true, supermarkets in wealthy areas would be much more expensive than in poor areas, but they aren't. No one likes overpaying for groceries, and a modest government income isn't going to change that.
yorwba 2y ago
> Of course people don't quit their jobs and careers because they are part of a small group enrolled in a 3-year scientific study. Except the study did show people quitting their jobs at a higher rate. But they mostly switched to new jobs instead of becoming unemployed. Of course people given the choice between working less or making more money usually choose the money. People who choose otherwise are already part-timing/episodically employed/on unemployment benefits/getting subsidized by their family. Presumably there's a level of UBI where most people wouldn't see the need to work anymore, but if they quit permanently, this will reduce the supply of goods, increasing prices and limiting how much UBI can buy, to the point where people are incentivized to start working again. So it's a self-regulating system. Of course it would be less disruptive to start with a very low UBI that gradually increases, instead of starting high and letting inflation sort out the rest.
- spidersenses 2y ago
  >Of course it would be less disruptive to start with a very low UBI that gradually increases This is a very good point that I haven't even heard made by proponents of this idea before. Thanks!
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  You could argue it's a self-regulating system as well with UBI at zero.
- meinersbur 2y ago
  It also matters what jobs they change to. There is a documentary out there showing someone who could quit their regular job and become an artist thanks to an UBI pilot (Canada IIRC). It is presented as a positive example in that they did not become lazy, but just work something different and still make revenue close to what they earned on their job by selling art. How many people will become artists with UBI introduced nationally? Who is going to buy all that art?
  - ForHackernews 2y ago
    Who cares if anyone buys the art? In a world with basic income where people didn't have to worry about survival wages, people could make art just because they were moved to make art.
potato3732842 2y ago
> but the psychology is completely different to if basic income was actually universal and expected to continue in the long-term. Would it though? Do people really trust their governments that much? Poor people who this would be most applicable to tend to deal with the government a lot more than UBI proponents so their trust levels are probably different.
- stevage 2y ago
  > Do people really trust their governments that much? In Europe? Yeah. Safety nets are not suddenly taken away.
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    Social security wasn't taken away and probably never will be. How's it doing? What's it's 30yr outlook? You don't need to just trust that the program will exist, but that it will be useful on a timeline long enough that you can eschew investing in skills that make money. How many greeks do you think would trust their government to do that? What about the brits? But of course policy minutia that can make or break programs are unimportant compared to cheap internet comments.
    - TuringNYC 2y ago
      >> Social security wasn't taken away and probably never will be. In the US, the "trick" is usually just to extend the age at which you get social security. Life expectancy is not universally equal, they vary widely based on gender, race, economics. For some subsets of our population Social security has essentially be eliminated for half the cohort because it starts past the average life expectancy. (to be clear, I think this is atrocious)
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
grafmax 2y ago
The money supply argument seems flawed to me. As long as poorer people gain a larger share of the money supply, their increased spending power would outpace inflation. That’s because inflation is a function of the money supply in total, not the money supply of those with lower income.
1024core 2y ago
If they really wanted to answer the question, they'd have to gather several millions of dollars, and then go to some island somewhere and provide UBI to everyone (without publicizing it, if at all possible). Then observe the changes in that group of people. For best results, choose an island in a developed part of the world.
simonsarris 2y ago
Even a lifetime study would take an even longer time to cover the effects of children of people who never worked. We do have some data on that, because of SSI (not to be confused with SSDI), results not great. It may be a selection effect, of course.
api 2y ago
One of my concerns about UBI is that it would just cause inflation to raise prices precisely high enough to cancel the effect of UBI. You see this on a more limited scale when we do other things that subsidize demand. Give people assistance with home buying? House prices go up. Make college loans cheap and easy to get? Tuition costs go crazy.
ChuckMcM 2y ago
I'll give you a counter example. "Retirement." Nominally retirement is "forever" in that once you are retired your pension/savings/whatever is funding your existence needs. Having lived most of my life in the SF Bay area I've watched as my cohort came here as college grads, went through the various tech life cycles, and then aged out into "retirement." I put it in quotes because some retired voluntarily, others did not. Involuntary retirement or "funemployement" as the euphemism goes, was typically below the level of flexibility that they had imagined they would have being retired. Various life events, health issues, marital issues, Etc. spread the spectrum even further. As a result the 'basic income' for this cohort ranges from just below 'covering groceries, utilities, and rent in a low cost of living area' to an annual travel budget, replacement budget for cars/boats/etc, and possibly a second property with some 'feature' (like a ski cabin, a beach bungalow, etc). What is consistent across the spectrum is a desire to "do something productive with their time." That skews towards volunteer work if their basic life needs are met, piecework if having extra money would meet some currently unmet needs. I don't think I know anyone who could sit in the rocking chair on the patio every day and watch the sun come up and go down, or spend every day at the golf course or some other leisure activity, choose to take that path. That said, pretty much everyone I know who has retired took an extended amount of time (typically months) to 'unwind.' Once unwound, life seems to assert itself. Now I don't think this is scientific, its a very specific group of people. Generally professionals who worked in office jobs vs trades. And a number of them 'fail' at retirement which has them going back to work because they didn't have sufficient tools for creating their own direction or something. But laziness isn't a trait I've seen. A completely different direction perhaps, but a direction rather than standing still.
- jaggederest 2y ago
  And, to point out, these are people coming to the end of their effective working careers, with things like medical problems and disability to inhibit their productivity. The idea that, given some paltry basic income ala current social security payment levels, young adults would just bail out is pretty strange to me. People already more or less have that option through disability and not very many people utilize it. I would expect to see something in that range, certainly below 10%, if we had a minimal basic income.
neilwilson 2y ago
Particularly when they ignore the largest data set we already have - the state pensions. They are a basic income within a fixed exchange rate area by age rather than location. There are trillions of data points across decades of provision. With compulsory retirement and changes removing compulsory retirement. The results are clear. People tend to stop working once they receive it, even if they have the option to continue. An inconvenient truth. And the result is that the age the pension becomes available has to be pushed higher to sustain it. Therefore the alternative time uses are insufficiently productive to be of help overall. If it was a viable proposition there should be a virtuous cascade driving the pension age down, not up.
- em-bee 2y ago
  funny, this sister comment here makes the exact opposite argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43639593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43639593 but even if you are right about retired people stopping to work, you also need to consider their age, and maybe the feeling that they have earned it after working for decades? the same isn't true for young people, so the comparison is not conclusive.
  - neilwilson 2y ago
    What age do you think that “feeling” kicks in and how do you “feel” about policy operating according to vague feelings? I’m old enough to have income generating assets but not enough to call it a day completely. Reduce the state pension age to 18 (which is what a Universal Basic Income is) and I will. Then you’ll be working to support me and the tax will have to be high enough to force you to generate a surplus that can be passed on to me. That’s how UBI will work in reality.
foogazi 2y ago
> completely different to if basic income was actually universal and expected to continue in the long-term If we were in a “long term UBI situation” how would people really trust that the cash would keep flowing? If current benefit programs (Medicare, social security, ACA, food stamps) are under attack how would it work with UBI ? It would be fine for older workers to step back, but what about young adults coming into the workforce - would they just skip learning?

bravura 2y ago

Quantity has a quality all of its own.

missedthecue 2y ago

yeah, there are basically three questions people have for UBI. 1. Does it cause inflation 2. What is the impact on employment/productivity 3. Can we afford to tax ourselves to pay ourselves in a way that makes sense? These studies answer none of these.

oulipo 2y ago
Well the study at least answers your second point, it shows that people are enjoying their work more, and that they change jobs more often (ie take more risks) and stay as employed as before and #3 at least as already been well modelled economically, UBI replaces many other welfare programs, so we can definitely afford it
- DennisP 2y ago
  And #3 implies that it's not going to cause inflation, any more than those other welfare programs do now. In general, as long as we're funding it with taxes instead of by printing money, it's not going to cause any extra inflation.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > Well the study at least answers your second point, it shows that people are enjoying their work more, and that they change jobs more often (ie take more risks) and stay as employed as before As GGP said, this doesn't compare. There's even nothing magically non-linear about it: people stay employed, because they know the UBI study will only last a few years, after which they'll need to get back to normal. It makes no sense to interrupt your career for it, as the "hole in your CV" will just turn into a severe and compounding disadvantage in lost years and experience.
  - HenryBemis 2y ago
    It's not just that. I fear tha UBI will be 'frozen in time', so let's say it's something insanely generous, EUR 5000 per month. After that happens, every month we will have a record inflation, and soon enough the EUR 5000 will rent you Harry Potter's staircase-'flat' and 3 pizzas. The only way I see this being sustainable is get as far as possible from the big cities, buy a tiny piece of land, by a durable tiny home, buy solar panels, get a tablet with all Gutenberg books, and find a soulmate that will follow you to that journey. No kids, no private schools, no parties, no nothing. Everything will be swallowed by inflation.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Yup, I 100% agree. This is my worry too. And it goes beyond real estate market and landlords - they are the obvious infinitely deep money sinkholes of society, but even if housing magically became free and available to everyone, I believe the sudden inflation would happen anyway. I believe this to be a fundamental feature of free market economy in general. It's something I started realizing many years ago, and thought about a lot ever since; in the last year, I distilled that belief into a concise phrase I now use for this: The market constantly adjusts to keep the average disposable income to zero. Except now I realized that "average" is the wrong measure here, I should be saying "median", and also I've been mistakenly using the term "disposable income" (which actually means just after-tax income) to refer to "discretionary income" (what you're left with after covering taxes, bills, and essentials). Which leads me to the New and Better, Updated, Version 2.0 of my economic theory: The market constantly adjusts to keep median discretionary income near zero. I'd imagine this is an obvious thing that's already been named 100 years ago, but so far my research only pointed me to things like "neutrality of money", and some specific examples of my statement holding, yet nothing that covers it entirely. (EDIT: in the unlikely case I'm not an idiot, and that this phrasing was not used/named before, I welcome credit; inquiries from the Nobel Foundation should be directed to my e-mail address, which is in my profile.)
- jay_kyburz 2y ago
  If somebody offered me 1200 GBP a month, tax free, no strings attached, guaranteed for the rest of my life, there is no way I would continue working for somebody else. I would tinker around with open source and pet projects for the rest of my life. That's almost twice the aged pension here in Australia. (550 GBP) I guess I would also need some iron clad guarantee that the cost of living would not skyrocket.
xvedejas 2y ago
I'm personally most worried about increases in general income levels being soaked up by real estate holders. It's what we've seen happen in the SF bay area rents in response to tech fortunes. I don't see UBI actually increasing welfare much without a tax on land value to make landholding less profitable and redirecting the value of land into the UBI fund.
- gnfedhjmm2 2y ago
  “Based on nothing I disagree”
- mediaman 2y ago
  This only seems to be an issue if the marginal cost of building is too high to expand supply, though, right? Otherwise if people have more money, they bid up housing, then new stuff gets built, and supply profits decline. Of course, restricting supply is a problem. I also think this logic might break down in tightly restricted areas that are already vertically built out - Manhattan, for example, because costs per housing unit tend to follow a U curve with respect to height, where they decline with density but start increasing again at very high density, but that's not an issue in most places.
- mgfist 2y ago
  This can broadly be alleviated by regulations that make it far cheaper and easier to build. Currently, demand is the only access by which housing markets are dictated in heavily NIMBY areas like SF. Supply is an underused level due to cost and permitting issues.
- serviceberry 2y ago
  I don't think capital has any special attachment to real estate specifically. It's just that we have policies that essentially require your money to be invested into something (because inflation); and we turned real estate into a safe investment asset through policies that create perpetual scarcity. You can probably come up with policies that penalize real estate investments, but (a) it will just cause the investors to chase some other asset class, instead of redistributing wealth; (b) unless scarcity is addressed, it's unlikely that housing prices are going to drop. Landlords extract profits from the assets they hold, but they don't cause there to be fewer homes or apartments available.
jsdwarf 2y ago
You could study various subsidy regimes during the COVID-19 pandemic to answer this question. Some regimes subsidized resouces like energy, whereas other regimes provided something like an universal basic income (ubi) to small businesses/freelancers who were unable to serve their customers during lockdown. Austria was on the ubi side and we had huge problems with Inflation afterwards
- LaundroMat 2y ago
  I don't know whether you can tie that inflation to ubi-like measures(alone). The whole world suffered high inflation, not in the least because of the global disruption of the supply chain.
lawlessone 2y ago
>1. Does it cause inflation Our current system has inflation baked in, so im not sure how big an issue it is, so much as how much inflation?
benmoose 2y ago
We need to get serious about wealth taxes. The amount of money locked up in assets and land is staggering and has been under taxed for far too long.
- y-curious 2y ago
  I agree with the sentiment, but it matters very much how it's implemented. You would need to find a way to keep the money in your country, while also taxing more. It's actually very complicated, but yes, I agree with the notion.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  Said assets and land are already being used though. It's just a case of people wanting to "redistribute" them.
some1else 2y ago
My questions are more along the lines of: - Does it liberate people from meaningless employment? - Does it give a sufficient platform to people to bootstrap their own trade? - Does it give people the runway for meaningful creation / artistic self-actualization?
buu700 2y ago
Agreed. It's better than no data, but I don't really see what a study like this can hope to prove one way or another. Giving a handful of people free money isn't UBI any more than the lottery is UBI. It doesn't provide any information about the macroeconomic effects of an actual universal income, or about how a lifetime guarantee of continued payments would impact behavior. Personally, I think the necessity and viability of UBI will become apparent sooner than most would expect. If AI and related fields continue to advance at their current pace, at some point we'll be able to observe a clear trend toward an eventual government budget surplus paired with a mass unemployment crisis. Implementing a UBI or similar measure during that transitional period will be the only way to avoid a lot of unnecessary pain and societal upheaval. This won't cause excess inflation because the payments will be backed by real economic output; the payments will only serve to keep demand in line with supply. Eventually, we'll get to the point where a UBI with annual raises and a balanced budget can coexist. A pessimistic outlook would be that this heralds the end of human innovation and ingenuity; I personally predict that it kicks off a renaissance of entrepreneurship, invention, and scientific breakthroughs that at least matches the relative progress of the 20th century.
stego-tech 2y ago
I argue the studies don't have to answer these questions, because we already have the (uncomfortable) answers. > 1. Does it cause inflation On its own, yes, it would create inflation if rolled out globally. However, this is why serious advocates of UBI also point out that we need policies that ensure it isn't turned into a wealth pump into the upper/ruling classes. This entails things like rent, margin, and price controls on necessities like food, shelter, healthcare, education, and transportation, which also requires substantial public investment in those areas to deter or discourage privatization of those necessities. In other words, it means pissing off every landlord, upscale grocer, private hospital, utility company, telecom, private university, rideshare company, rail company, and Taxi owner for the sake of the public good. > 2. What is the impact on employment/productivity Generally speaking, humans want to do something productive with their time - it's the definition of productivity that varies from person to person. Those who think solely in economic output will say that negative-profitability employment isn't of value, even if that output has knock-on positive effects in the economy (such as the disparaging compensation for teachers and first responders despite the immense value they create in the long run). It's also why people sneer at the homeless or panhandlers as being "problematic" and "undeserving" of assistance for failing to "pull themselves up [by their bootstraps]." In reality, taking into account the whole picture, these sorts of individuals could (and studies show, often do) contribute to society better if they had support structures in place that prioritized long-term stability instead of quick KPIs for grant money. It could even be argued that UBI enabling humans to stay home and not work is itself a profitable exercise, since it removes friction from systems that those individuals might create by being forced to exist and interact with modern society and its lack of safeguards. Not only that, but the productivity gains could likely increase as we can finally eliminate "bullshit jobs" and give people the safety nets needed to start their own businesses instead - more restaurants, service experts, inventors, researchers, teachers, and other jobs that are high risk/low reward in the current system, wouldn't be in an economy with UBI and associated policies to provide for necessities and essentials. > 3. Can we afford to tax ourselves to pay ourselves in a way that makes sense? We can, but this is arguably the hardest opposition to surmount because it fundamentally means higher taxes on everyone, and that's a bitter medicine nobody wants to swallow. Countries with successful social safety nets have higher tax rates, but also higher quality of life as a result. Unfortunately, the current technocrats and their sycophants (not to mention their industrial predecessors and their decedents) have managed to convince a plurality of powerful people that the world would be perfect if everyone just worked harder and became billionaires themselves so we'd have no more poor people and thus no need for taxation in principle - a fantasy so high and lofty it makes the MCU look plausibly accurate. It would mean building a society of high taxes, rigid policies, and a massive reduction in (or outright elimination of) loopholes for wealth preservation, especially across generations. It'd mean punishing hoarding of wealth, as that would (rightly) signal exploitation rather than success. These are things most people simply aren't ready for, because they still believe themselves to be one lottery ticket, one inheritance, one startup, one IPO, or one crypto boom away from being billionaires themselves, and don't want to accept that the outcome of the 99% is to work for the rest of their lives before dying in destitution of some form under the current system - a depressing reality to be sure, but all the more reason to change it. So there you have it. If all you look at is the current system as-is and shoehorning UBI into it, then obviously you have a slam dunk case for why it's a bad thing. UBI advocates like myself, however, acknowledge that it's merely one component in a larger transformation of society itself towards more equitable outcomes, one where colorful pieces of paper are inherently devalued for necessities like food, shelter, healthcare, education, and transportation, while increased in value for actual luxuries. It's an inversion of our present society for the betterment of all, and that's why it's incompatible with the questions you raise above (which seek to preserve a broken status quo).

numpad0 2y ago

will it become a capped negative sales tax, in a way? I don't see how amount of currency smaller than individual UBI amount make tangible sense under its presence.

rsoto2 2y ago

It's funny, people like you will say a study is too small and focused to be worthwhile. But then we have the case of Alaska, an entire state receiving a yearly stipend(basic income). And the same type of people will say well it's too broad you can't possibly pinpoint any direct effects. https://www.ktoo.org/2015/02/20/alaska-tops-gallups-index-well/ https://www.ktoo.org/2015/02/20/alaska-tops-gallups-index-we... Science is not made for perfection and many studies are _not possible_ it doesn't mean there's nothing useful to gain from it for policy makers. It's also simpler to study smaller groups than effects on entire countries.

exe34 2y ago
> “It’s awesome! I wasn’t even aware that we were even close to being number 1, so seeing that was really nice to know,” Brown said It seems to have come as a shock to a lot of them to find out they were so happy.
deleted 2y ago
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floxy 2y ago
Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend for 2024: $1,702, or $141.83/month https://pfd.alaska.gov/ https://pfd.alaska.gov/

oulipo 2y ago

Perhaps, but they have actual arguments for their claim, and you have just hypotheses. Scientific studies like those are the best approximation we can have to a full rollout. So perhaps results won't be exactly the same with a full rollout, but at least they have already taken out the "people will just behave nonsensically / be worse off" hypotheses

James_K 2y ago

> the likely feedback effects on the broader economy that a universal rollout would have It's interesting to describe as "likely" something for which there is no evidence. This is an actively anti-science belief. It seems to me as if you really don't like the idea of UBI and so are saying that, if it actually happened, the effect would be the opposite of what experimental data shows. This is pretty clearly biased. > (increase in the money supply) There is no effect on money supply if this is funded through taxes. > Some things just can't be tested ahead of time empirically. You can gradually expand the pool of people receiving UBI to see how these effects scale. Begin in one city, then increase to a larger region, then do it nationally.

gmoot 2y ago
> There is no effect on money supply if this is funded through taxes Of course there is. Suppose we tax Elon several billion dollars. Now, instead of sitting in his money vault, it flows into the economy where it increases demand pressure.
- James_K 2y ago
  He doesn't have a money vault. He has almost zero cash holdings. If you tax him, then he will have to sell assets to pay for those taxes, which removes money from the economy as that money was being actively spent on his assets. The only situation when money supply changes is if someone has a literal mattress full of cash hidden away. Even if you just have money in a savings account, it acts as a fractional reserve for the banking system meaning that there is a net decrease in money supply when you give it to the government as banks can no longer use it as the backing for loans.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  To split hairs slightly that is the "velocity of money" (basically how often does the average dollar get spent and passed around per year). Money supply is the total amount of (a given type of) money in existence. But yeah, the effect on inflation is the same.

dalmo3 2y ago

This is the UBI experiment I want to see: The government creates a new currency called $UBI, with the same legal tender status as the official currency for that country ($FIAT). I.e. people can use it to pay taxes, and people are required to accept it when doing commerce. Both currencies exist in parallel. In the true spirit of ubi, everyone is entitled to an equal amount of it, and no one should be worse off by it. So they need to issue the currency new currency to give away. They set up a system so everyone gets the same amount of money, at the same time, for maximum fairness. Everyone's income just goes up, equally. $UBI officially has 1:1 parity to $FIAT, and this parity is used to calculate how much they'll need to "print" out at a given month. Let's say it's living_wage*population_size. That amount can be adjusted once a year by factoring in the government reserves built up exclusively from tax returns. In other words, the monetary base is a known, deterministic quantity. They allow free exchange between $FIAT and $UBI, but the government does not officially exchanges it. They also allow people to set prices to their products and services freely.

stevage 2y ago
What is the benefit of all this extra complexity?

mrangle 2y ago

That's right. Community wide Universal Basic Income would cause price rises for shelf goods, negating the intended beneficial effect. As the value of money is always relative to its scarcity. More money held by all individuals always leads to higher prices, because it leads to money being worth less. Life only becomes less expensive when making more money than others. This is a basic dynamic of how money works, at its most fundamental level. Society would need price controls to stop shelf prices from rising, and to maintain the beneficial effect of UBI (being able to afford more goods). At that point shortages are incoming, and UBI income functionally transforms from money to credits for goods. Even if it is still called money. Credits implies a limit on how much goods people are allotted, even if given credits / money to redeem said allotment. The government needs to decide how much in goods each individual is allotted. This is where it gets bad. Communist propaganda practice is to promise that the communist society will allot a maximum amount goods per person out of its GDP, implying an evenly distributed yet relatively well off populace. Visualize a pie that is cut in large slices and completely distributed. The rub is that the government gets to keep any part of the pie that is not distributed, and so its incentive is to distribute the least amount of the pie and the smallest slices. Which is what we see in practice. People given the minimum of their collective production value to sustain their existence. With the government hoarding the rest. Slaves in all but name. The government now has a taste of control over wealth distribution for part of its GDP, which it enacts via entitlement over some production value of work and private business. Whatever production value is left for the private sector economy is now tempting for the government to also take over and minimally distribute in the same manner, because again the government gets to keep much of the money. Private business and employment begin to become dirty words. We live in a World that is dominated by the fundamental nature of money, some would call it a fallen world. Making a low amount of money feels like a slave's existence. However, at least in a free market economy there is a type of escape hatch from that existence should someone figure out how to provide society with relatively more value than others. Whereas in a socialist society, that escape hatch tends to legally close as the years tick by and the personal allotment of goods declines.

stevage 2y ago
> That's right. Community wide Universal Basic Income would cause price rises for shelf goods, negating the intended beneficial effect. If that were true, supermarkets in wealthy areas would be much more expensive than in poor areas, but they aren't. No one likes overpaying for groceries, and a modest government income isn't going to change that.

yorwba 2y ago

> Of course people don't quit their jobs and careers because they are part of a small group enrolled in a 3-year scientific study. Except the study did show people quitting their jobs at a higher rate. But they mostly switched to new jobs instead of becoming unemployed. Of course people given the choice between working less or making more money usually choose the money. People who choose otherwise are already part-timing/episodically employed/on unemployment benefits/getting subsidized by their family. Presumably there's a level of UBI where most people wouldn't see the need to work anymore, but if they quit permanently, this will reduce the supply of goods, increasing prices and limiting how much UBI can buy, to the point where people are incentivized to start working again. So it's a self-regulating system. Of course it would be less disruptive to start with a very low UBI that gradually increases, instead of starting high and letting inflation sort out the rest.

spidersenses 2y ago
>Of course it would be less disruptive to start with a very low UBI that gradually increases This is a very good point that I haven't even heard made by proponents of this idea before. Thanks!
SoftTalker 2y ago
You could argue it's a self-regulating system as well with UBI at zero.
meinersbur 2y ago
It also matters what jobs they change to. There is a documentary out there showing someone who could quit their regular job and become an artist thanks to an UBI pilot (Canada IIRC). It is presented as a positive example in that they did not become lazy, but just work something different and still make revenue close to what they earned on their job by selling art. How many people will become artists with UBI introduced nationally? Who is going to buy all that art?
- ForHackernews 2y ago
  Who cares if anyone buys the art? In a world with basic income where people didn't have to worry about survival wages, people could make art just because they were moved to make art.

potato3732842 2y ago

> but the psychology is completely different to if basic income was actually universal and expected to continue in the long-term. Would it though? Do people really trust their governments that much? Poor people who this would be most applicable to tend to deal with the government a lot more than UBI proponents so their trust levels are probably different.

stevage 2y ago
> Do people really trust their governments that much? In Europe? Yeah. Safety nets are not suddenly taken away.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  Social security wasn't taken away and probably never will be. How's it doing? What's it's 30yr outlook? You don't need to just trust that the program will exist, but that it will be useful on a timeline long enough that you can eschew investing in skills that make money. How many greeks do you think would trust their government to do that? What about the brits? But of course policy minutia that can make or break programs are unimportant compared to cheap internet comments.
  - TuringNYC 2y ago
    >> Social security wasn't taken away and probably never will be. In the US, the "trick" is usually just to extend the age at which you get social security. Life expectancy is not universally equal, they vary widely based on gender, race, economics. For some subsets of our population Social security has essentially be eliminated for half the cohort because it starts past the average life expectancy. (to be clear, I think this is atrocious)
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]

grafmax 2y ago

The money supply argument seems flawed to me. As long as poorer people gain a larger share of the money supply, their increased spending power would outpace inflation. That’s because inflation is a function of the money supply in total, not the money supply of those with lower income.

1024core 2y ago

If they really wanted to answer the question, they'd have to gather several millions of dollars, and then go to some island somewhere and provide UBI to everyone (without publicizing it, if at all possible). Then observe the changes in that group of people. For best results, choose an island in a developed part of the world.

simonsarris 2y ago

Even a lifetime study would take an even longer time to cover the effects of children of people who never worked. We do have some data on that, because of SSI (not to be confused with SSDI), results not great. It may be a selection effect, of course.

api 2y ago

One of my concerns about UBI is that it would just cause inflation to raise prices precisely high enough to cancel the effect of UBI. You see this on a more limited scale when we do other things that subsidize demand. Give people assistance with home buying? House prices go up. Make college loans cheap and easy to get? Tuition costs go crazy.

ChuckMcM 2y ago

I'll give you a counter example. "Retirement." Nominally retirement is "forever" in that once you are retired your pension/savings/whatever is funding your existence needs. Having lived most of my life in the SF Bay area I've watched as my cohort came here as college grads, went through the various tech life cycles, and then aged out into "retirement." I put it in quotes because some retired voluntarily, others did not. Involuntary retirement or "funemployement" as the euphemism goes, was typically below the level of flexibility that they had imagined they would have being retired. Various life events, health issues, marital issues, Etc. spread the spectrum even further. As a result the 'basic income' for this cohort ranges from just below 'covering groceries, utilities, and rent in a low cost of living area' to an annual travel budget, replacement budget for cars/boats/etc, and possibly a second property with some 'feature' (like a ski cabin, a beach bungalow, etc). What is consistent across the spectrum is a desire to "do something productive with their time." That skews towards volunteer work if their basic life needs are met, piecework if having extra money would meet some currently unmet needs. I don't think I know anyone who could sit in the rocking chair on the patio every day and watch the sun come up and go down, or spend every day at the golf course or some other leisure activity, choose to take that path. That said, pretty much everyone I know who has retired took an extended amount of time (typically months) to 'unwind.' Once unwound, life seems to assert itself. Now I don't think this is scientific, its a very specific group of people. Generally professionals who worked in office jobs vs trades. And a number of them 'fail' at retirement which has them going back to work because they didn't have sufficient tools for creating their own direction or something. But laziness isn't a trait I've seen. A completely different direction perhaps, but a direction rather than standing still.

jaggederest 2y ago
And, to point out, these are people coming to the end of their effective working careers, with things like medical problems and disability to inhibit their productivity. The idea that, given some paltry basic income ala current social security payment levels, young adults would just bail out is pretty strange to me. People already more or less have that option through disability and not very many people utilize it. I would expect to see something in that range, certainly below 10%, if we had a minimal basic income.

neilwilson 2y ago

Particularly when they ignore the largest data set we already have - the state pensions. They are a basic income within a fixed exchange rate area by age rather than location. There are trillions of data points across decades of provision. With compulsory retirement and changes removing compulsory retirement. The results are clear. People tend to stop working once they receive it, even if they have the option to continue. An inconvenient truth. And the result is that the age the pension becomes available has to be pushed higher to sustain it. Therefore the alternative time uses are insufficiently productive to be of help overall. If it was a viable proposition there should be a virtuous cascade driving the pension age down, not up.

em-bee 2y ago
funny, this sister comment here makes the exact opposite argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43639593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43639593 but even if you are right about retired people stopping to work, you also need to consider their age, and maybe the feeling that they have earned it after working for decades? the same isn't true for young people, so the comparison is not conclusive.
- neilwilson 2y ago
  What age do you think that “feeling” kicks in and how do you “feel” about policy operating according to vague feelings? I’m old enough to have income generating assets but not enough to call it a day completely. Reduce the state pension age to 18 (which is what a Universal Basic Income is) and I will. Then you’ll be working to support me and the tax will have to be high enough to force you to generate a surplus that can be passed on to me. That’s how UBI will work in reality.

foogazi 2y ago

> completely different to if basic income was actually universal and expected to continue in the long-term If we were in a “long term UBI situation” how would people really trust that the cash would keep flowing? If current benefit programs (Medicare, social security, ACA, food stamps) are under attack how would it work with UBI ? It would be fine for older workers to step back, but what about young adults coming into the workforce - would they just skip learning?