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We already have something that resembles a basic income in developed countries. It's called retirement pensions. And what we see there is that most people, as s

We already have something that resembles a basic income in developed countries. It's called retirement pensions. And what we see there is that most people, as soon as they are eligible for their pension, they stop working. Sure, they may volunteer a few hours a month here and there, but their productivity plummets compared to the previous year when they didn't collect that pension. I don't blame them one bit -- it's exactly the same thing I did once I retired. So what happens as we lower the age at which they receive a pension? Different countries and companies have sometimes offered pensions to some of their senior workers to reduce their workforce -- the results were the same. Most people stop working as soon as they have a lifetime guaranteed income that allows them to afford life's essentials, even if they are in their forties. A pilot where the participants know or suspect that the money will soon stop flowing won't capture the real-world effect of this decades-long experiment that we call pensions. And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained?

stablgeniushatr 1y ago
Except…people retire so they can stop working? Or they retire because they can no longer physically or mentally work.
voxl 1y ago
False equivalence. People stop working during retirement because it is the very cultural expectation to not work. There is no reason to believe this analogy you're attempting to make would transfer to something like a negative tax rate
- mbrumlow 1y ago
  Maybe they can stop working because of cultural allowance. Who knows how many people should retire at 30 if the social norms allowed it. Think about it this way. If a 60 year old says “I’m retiring” most responses will be “aw good for you, you earned it”. But if a 23 year old says “I am retiring” I guarantee there will be many more negative responses and questions.
Swizec 1y ago
> A pilot where the participants know or suspect that the money will soon stop flowing won't capture the real-world effect of this decades-long experiment that we call pensions. There is a big difference in getting a guaranteed income in your 20’s vs your 60’s. In your 20’s it unlocks taking big risks and swing for the fences. YC bets in this, for example. What can ambitious kids do when they don’t need to worry about money? But when you’ve been grinding for 40 years … yeah for sure most people stop working.
- mulletbum 1y ago
  I think Universal Healthcare does this too. I just turned 40 and I would be WAY more interested in jumping jobs if it existed. Instead I keep on because my wife is going back to school and such, so everything relies on me.
  - hybrid_study 1y ago
    Boom!
  - mgkimsal 1y ago
    > Instead I keep on because my wife is going back to school and such, so everything relies on me. This has been so apparent to me over the last 20 years. I've seen so many people who wanted to switch jobs - perhaps a move to other parts of the country for a new job - but are very tied to employer-provided insurance. People with family members with varying health issues often feel especially 'stuck' to particular jobs because of the 'good' insurance, perhaps tied to specific regional hospitals with specific networks of doctors and specialists. I've heard this from multiple colleagues over the years and it's so disheartening. We've got so much unlocked human potential, and we get tied to specific areas because of arbitrary self-imposed constraints. Self-imposed I mean on ourselves as a whole, not individually-imposed. So so so disheartening...
  - chneu 1y ago
    This is by design. The USA pairing healthcare to your job was on purpose.
interstice 1y ago
If you asked me what I would spend a 'free' 10k on at 15, 25 or 35 I would have given you radically different answers. I don't expect what someone does with basic income at 65 to have much relation to what they would do at other stages in life.
- atomicnumber3 1y ago
  15: GTS 8800 25: GTX 1080 35: RTX 8090 I suspect when I'm 45, $10,000 won't get nvidias flagship card, so I'll let you know about that one when I get there
andrepd 1y ago
Well yeah it's the exact same thing except... given to people when they're 67, i.e. after a lifetime of working and about 10 years from the mean age of death. Gee why would they stop working, you think? > And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained? Technology gives us massive gains in productivity; we could reasonably reduce working hours to <20/week in the developed world. We might have less business dynamic analysts or scrum masters or social media coordinators. We'll be fine.
- tacticus 1y ago
  > Technology gives us massive gains in productivity; we could reasonably reduce working hours to <20/week in the developed world. We might have less business dynamic analysts or scrum masters or social media coordinators. We'll be fine. > beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us! Unfortunately the governments and the wealthy looked at Hayek and decided they much preferred the idea where they could continue to abuse the workers.
- pj_mukh 1y ago
  "We might have less business dynamic analysts or scrum masters or social media coordinators." Do we have any guarantees of this? Couldn't we equally have way less Nurses, Doctors, ER Techs, Construction Workers building homes, Teachers. Feels like all the stressful, back-breaking jobs will be quitting first?
  - AngryData 1y ago
    Or it could give those people a reasonable bargaining position for their labor and they will be able to demand better wages or hours which would attract more people into those industries.
    - pj_mukh 1y ago
Jedd 1y ago
> It's called retirement pensions. And what we see there is that most people, as soon as they are eligible ... This feels like a bizarre take on quite a different arrangement. That demographic has planned for ~40 years for tha transition, and in many cases is strongly encouraged by their industry / government / superannuation scheme, etc - to stop working at that age. Extrapolating that back to providing a safety net to 20-40yo's just seems to miss everything about UBI - unless it's a 'I didn't have this, so no one else should' position? All the research we're seeing - in very small, time-boxed, precarious trials - indicate that we'll probably get a positive result out of implementing this more broadly, without a drop-dead date attached. The counter-argument always seems to be 'Oh, but we might not...' (and then some opinions).
- wredcoll 1y ago
  Pascal's scam! Oh no, what if the world explodes! We can't risk it!
- david-gpu 1y ago
  > Extrapolating that back to providing a safety net to 20-40yo's just seems to miss everything about UBI - unless it's a 'I didn't have this, so no one else should' position? Quite the opposite. I basically retired at 40. A few of my coworkers did the same. Most people, when given the means to quit working, choose to retire. Most people don't retire at age X because they have reached age X, they do it because they finally are eligible for a pension.
  - stouset 1y ago
    > I basically retired at 40. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess your monthly spending exceeds $10-20k and is probably well north of $100k.
    - david-gpu 1y ago
      Wrong by a large factor. We have a very modest lifestyle.
  - 1y ago
mrangle 1y ago
I'm not a fan of basic income due to its inflationary effect that all-but neutralizes its spending power. I also think that the monetary system is inherently imperfect. To put it mildly. It is structurally unfixable and there is no possible utopia within it. Last, there is no other good option that I know of. But pensions are not Basic Income, thank goodness. They're a payment into an investment fund that grows as lifetime earned income grows. They're an asset, exactly the same as a business is an asset. In fact, pension funds invest in businesses. Whether or not that fund is well managed is another discussion. Moreover, most people in the United States (at least) do not get pensions aside from a minimal social security payment. Which was also paid into a fund. Working is only individually valuable when there are good jobs, or to fend off starvation. What working is not is an immutable positive value that any de facto sweat shop owner can claim to offer the opportunity for. At a certain point the social contract is broken and working becomes something, at the least, that is not virtuous to offer nor to fulfill. Except insofar as one's personal survival needs are concerned. When there are only terrible jobs, then society should not feel morally compelled to work them. Especially when it has other income. And especially when a concurrent social value is to drop wages and benefits through the floor, by any means necessary. For the sake of virtue, are business owners working underpaid second jobs "for the system"? Are successful business owners widely coming out of retirement to work "for the sake of the system"? We're not talking about volunteering at the old age home. We're talking about a real work schedule. Society may have to work those jobs out of necessity, but they can and should tell people trying to morally shame them with a "come out of retirement and to work attitude" to go copulate with themselves. Especially when the social contract between employers and employees is long-shattered beyond repair. In society, there can be low paying jobs alongside well paying jobs. What there can't be is moralizing combined with decades of illegal shenanigans whose sole purpose is to suppress wages / job security (especially due to wages) and undermine working conditions. "Productivity". Give us a break. Unless your payment is compelling enough to get me to work, as a retired person the health of your business is not my morality nor my productivity. Your business is yours, and mine is my own. Are those business owners going to come and "be productive" by cleaning my gutters after work? Are they going to "be productive" by doing my taxes? >And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained? That may be the most communist mindset I've ever seen written out on this forum. Being a WalMart floor employee is not a virtuous contribution to the system, above being retired. It's an agreement, for a certain wage, to be a part of the employee pool of the Walton family's for-profit vehicle. Would it be virtuous to come out of retirement and work that job if it paid nothing? Should the Walton's pay every red cent of their profit to employees, make nothing themselves, and run their business regardless and for the sake of the system? The virtue is one's monetary needs, and the Walton's have to pay enough to meet the social contract requirement to maintain enough employees in their employee pool. If they don't have enough employees, then they aren't meeting the unspoken requirement. No amount of moralizing / whining is going to increase their social virtue. Only cash on-offer will. Joe's construction or accounting business is not "the system" either. It's Joe's income vehicle. Retired people have their own income vehicles. If the employer-employee relationship is a social contract, and not slavery, then working is no more "for the system" then making a profit is. And if both are needed to "sustain the system", and the business owner can't draw enough people to work via a pay package, then the answer is to bring them in as partners. If both are for the benefit of the system, and one person is going to be morally compelled to work, and another is going to be morally compelled to make a profit, and the pay isn't high enough to compel the employee, then they need to be made a profit partner in the business. When I hear someone whining that they are worried about having enough workforce, I think that they are exhausting their vocabulary to avoid stating that they're too cheap to pay employees enough for the job. I'm not saying that they have to be compelled to pay a minimum wage. Offer $1 an hour for all I would care. As long as the other side of that isn't to illegally / immorally undermine the labor pool. But the other side of that is if they aren't paying enough to draw employees, then the "I'm going to employ people" part of their business is not viable. The other side of it is not "people are too over-benefitted / over-privileged to work". If you want someone to join a social contract, then you have to make a compelling enough offer. That's our only "system". Anything else needs to be a partnership / significant enough profit split. When the pay is rock-bottom, employees are scarce, and those profit shares are eventually legally compelled because "oh no, the system", then it's formal communism. When the employees are legally compelled without partnerships, then its slavery.
pasquinelli 1y ago
> And what we see there is that most people, as soon as they are eligible for their pension, they stop working. oh well that's cuz they're retired.
Aurornis 1y ago
> We already have something that resembles a basic income in developed countries. It's called retirement pensions. These aren’t comparable at all. UBI programs would start at adulthood and not require any work. Someone receiving a retirement pension has put in many years of work.
rhelz 1y ago
// most people as soon as they are eligible...stop working...// Is that true? I mean, the best comparison to this wouldn't be some kind of pension system. It would be the universal guaranteed income we already have. Yes, we guarantee every citizen a minimum income...as long as they are over 65 :-) Most of them would probably keep working in some capacity if they didn't lose their benefits.
luisfmh 1y ago
The system that is killing our planet, that exploits and ends up killing the majority of its unwilling participants? Yeah, I don't think the loss in productivity will be a bad thing. Maybe people will consider the effect of their work before doing it a little more when they don't have a gun to their head.
TFYS 1y ago
> And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained? I think people and markets would just adapt to a lower level of consumption and amount of work. The work that people find truly important, like growing food, construction of housing, healthcare, etc. would remain in demand. The demand for things that people don't really want to work to create, or work to consume, would be reduced. So salaries for work that actually matters to people would increase and people would still do that work, and salaries for work that produces things that people don't really need would be reduced. In the end we'd have a society that only does the work that people actually want and need to get done and consume only things that have enough value to justify working for it. Less work, less consumption, probably happier people.
tukantje 1y ago
Elderly population not working is _hardly_ the equivalent of UBI. Besides; in most developed countries you are actually _penalized_ for working while retired; and furthermore most elderly people on pension tend to still do work such as handling childcare for grand kids.
tharga8616 1y ago
What do you expect after a life of forced labour? Do they stop helping their families on the daily tasks? I think these questions should clarify your thoughts.

stablgeniushatr 1y ago

Except…people retire so they can stop working? Or they retire because they can no longer physically or mentally work.

voxl 1y ago

False equivalence. People stop working during retirement because it is the very cultural expectation to not work. There is no reason to believe this analogy you're attempting to make would transfer to something like a negative tax rate

mbrumlow 1y ago
Maybe they can stop working because of cultural allowance. Who knows how many people should retire at 30 if the social norms allowed it. Think about it this way. If a 60 year old says “I’m retiring” most responses will be “aw good for you, you earned it”. But if a 23 year old says “I am retiring” I guarantee there will be many more negative responses and questions.

Swizec 1y ago

> A pilot where the participants know or suspect that the money will soon stop flowing won't capture the real-world effect of this decades-long experiment that we call pensions. There is a big difference in getting a guaranteed income in your 20’s vs your 60’s. In your 20’s it unlocks taking big risks and swing for the fences. YC bets in this, for example. What can ambitious kids do when they don’t need to worry about money? But when you’ve been grinding for 40 years … yeah for sure most people stop working.

mulletbum 1y ago
I think Universal Healthcare does this too. I just turned 40 and I would be WAY more interested in jumping jobs if it existed. Instead I keep on because my wife is going back to school and such, so everything relies on me.
- hybrid_study 1y ago
  Boom!
- mgkimsal 1y ago
  > Instead I keep on because my wife is going back to school and such, so everything relies on me. This has been so apparent to me over the last 20 years. I've seen so many people who wanted to switch jobs - perhaps a move to other parts of the country for a new job - but are very tied to employer-provided insurance. People with family members with varying health issues often feel especially 'stuck' to particular jobs because of the 'good' insurance, perhaps tied to specific regional hospitals with specific networks of doctors and specialists. I've heard this from multiple colleagues over the years and it's so disheartening. We've got so much unlocked human potential, and we get tied to specific areas because of arbitrary self-imposed constraints. Self-imposed I mean on ourselves as a whole, not individually-imposed. So so so disheartening...
- chneu 1y ago
  This is by design. The USA pairing healthcare to your job was on purpose.

interstice 1y ago

If you asked me what I would spend a 'free' 10k on at 15, 25 or 35 I would have given you radically different answers. I don't expect what someone does with basic income at 65 to have much relation to what they would do at other stages in life.

atomicnumber3 1y ago
15: GTS 8800 25: GTX 1080 35: RTX 8090 I suspect when I'm 45, $10,000 won't get nvidias flagship card, so I'll let you know about that one when I get there

andrepd 1y ago

Well yeah it's the exact same thing except... given to people when they're 67, i.e. after a lifetime of working and about 10 years from the mean age of death. Gee why would they stop working, you think? > And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained? Technology gives us massive gains in productivity; we could reasonably reduce working hours to <20/week in the developed world. We might have less business dynamic analysts or scrum masters or social media coordinators. We'll be fine.

tacticus 1y ago
> Technology gives us massive gains in productivity; we could reasonably reduce working hours to <20/week in the developed world. We might have less business dynamic analysts or scrum masters or social media coordinators. We'll be fine. > beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us! Unfortunately the governments and the wealthy looked at Hayek and decided they much preferred the idea where they could continue to abuse the workers.
pj_mukh 1y ago
"We might have less business dynamic analysts or scrum masters or social media coordinators." Do we have any guarantees of this? Couldn't we equally have way less Nurses, Doctors, ER Techs, Construction Workers building homes, Teachers. Feels like all the stressful, back-breaking jobs will be quitting first?
- AngryData 1y ago
  Or it could give those people a reasonable bargaining position for their labor and they will be able to demand better wages or hours which would attract more people into those industries.
  - pj_mukh 1y ago

Jedd 1y ago

> It's called retirement pensions. And what we see there is that most people, as soon as they are eligible ... This feels like a bizarre take on quite a different arrangement. That demographic has planned for ~40 years for tha transition, and in many cases is strongly encouraged by their industry / government / superannuation scheme, etc - to stop working at that age. Extrapolating that back to providing a safety net to 20-40yo's just seems to miss everything about UBI - unless it's a 'I didn't have this, so no one else should' position? All the research we're seeing - in very small, time-boxed, precarious trials - indicate that we'll probably get a positive result out of implementing this more broadly, without a drop-dead date attached. The counter-argument always seems to be 'Oh, but we might not...' (and then some opinions).

wredcoll 1y ago
Pascal's scam! Oh no, what if the world explodes! We can't risk it!
david-gpu 1y ago
> Extrapolating that back to providing a safety net to 20-40yo's just seems to miss everything about UBI - unless it's a 'I didn't have this, so no one else should' position? Quite the opposite. I basically retired at 40. A few of my coworkers did the same. Most people, when given the means to quit working, choose to retire. Most people don't retire at age X because they have reached age X, they do it because they finally are eligible for a pension.
- stouset 1y ago
  > I basically retired at 40. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess your monthly spending exceeds $10-20k and is probably well north of $100k.
  - david-gpu 1y ago
    Wrong by a large factor. We have a very modest lifestyle.
- 1y ago

mrangle 1y ago

I'm not a fan of basic income due to its inflationary effect that all-but neutralizes its spending power. I also think that the monetary system is inherently imperfect. To put it mildly. It is structurally unfixable and there is no possible utopia within it. Last, there is no other good option that I know of. But pensions are not Basic Income, thank goodness. They're a payment into an investment fund that grows as lifetime earned income grows. They're an asset, exactly the same as a business is an asset. In fact, pension funds invest in businesses. Whether or not that fund is well managed is another discussion. Moreover, most people in the United States (at least) do not get pensions aside from a minimal social security payment. Which was also paid into a fund. Working is only individually valuable when there are good jobs, or to fend off starvation. What working is not is an immutable positive value that any de facto sweat shop owner can claim to offer the opportunity for. At a certain point the social contract is broken and working becomes something, at the least, that is not virtuous to offer nor to fulfill. Except insofar as one's personal survival needs are concerned. When there are only terrible jobs, then society should not feel morally compelled to work them. Especially when it has other income. And especially when a concurrent social value is to drop wages and benefits through the floor, by any means necessary. For the sake of virtue, are business owners working underpaid second jobs "for the system"? Are successful business owners widely coming out of retirement to work "for the sake of the system"? We're not talking about volunteering at the old age home. We're talking about a real work schedule. Society may have to work those jobs out of necessity, but they can and should tell people trying to morally shame them with a "come out of retirement and to work attitude" to go copulate with themselves. Especially when the social contract between employers and employees is long-shattered beyond repair. In society, there can be low paying jobs alongside well paying jobs. What there can't be is moralizing combined with decades of illegal shenanigans whose sole purpose is to suppress wages / job security (especially due to wages) and undermine working conditions. "Productivity". Give us a break. Unless your payment is compelling enough to get me to work, as a retired person the health of your business is not my morality nor my productivity. Your business is yours, and mine is my own. Are those business owners going to come and "be productive" by cleaning my gutters after work? Are they going to "be productive" by doing my taxes? >And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained? That may be the most communist mindset I've ever seen written out on this forum. Being a WalMart floor employee is not a virtuous contribution to the system, above being retired. It's an agreement, for a certain wage, to be a part of the employee pool of the Walton family's for-profit vehicle. Would it be virtuous to come out of retirement and work that job if it paid nothing? Should the Walton's pay every red cent of their profit to employees, make nothing themselves, and run their business regardless and for the sake of the system? The virtue is one's monetary needs, and the Walton's have to pay enough to meet the social contract requirement to maintain enough employees in their employee pool. If they don't have enough employees, then they aren't meeting the unspoken requirement. No amount of moralizing / whining is going to increase their social virtue. Only cash on-offer will. Joe's construction or accounting business is not "the system" either. It's Joe's income vehicle. Retired people have their own income vehicles. If the employer-employee relationship is a social contract, and not slavery, then working is no more "for the system" then making a profit is. And if both are needed to "sustain the system", and the business owner can't draw enough people to work via a pay package, then the answer is to bring them in as partners. If both are for the benefit of the system, and one person is going to be morally compelled to work, and another is going to be morally compelled to make a profit, and the pay isn't high enough to compel the employee, then they need to be made a profit partner in the business. When I hear someone whining that they are worried about having enough workforce, I think that they are exhausting their vocabulary to avoid stating that they're too cheap to pay employees enough for the job. I'm not saying that they have to be compelled to pay a minimum wage. Offer $1 an hour for all I would care. As long as the other side of that isn't to illegally / immorally undermine the labor pool. But the other side of that is if they aren't paying enough to draw employees, then the "I'm going to employ people" part of their business is not viable. The other side of it is not "people are too over-benefitted / over-privileged to work". If you want someone to join a social contract, then you have to make a compelling enough offer. That's our only "system". Anything else needs to be a partnership / significant enough profit split. When the pay is rock-bottom, employees are scarce, and those profit shares are eventually legally compelled because "oh no, the system", then it's formal communism. When the employees are legally compelled without partnerships, then its slavery.

pasquinelli 1y ago

> And what we see there is that most people, as soon as they are eligible for their pension, they stop working. oh well that's cuz they're retired.

Aurornis 1y ago

> We already have something that resembles a basic income in developed countries. It's called retirement pensions. These aren’t comparable at all. UBI programs would start at adulthood and not require any work. Someone receiving a retirement pension has put in many years of work.

rhelz 1y ago

// most people as soon as they are eligible...stop working...// Is that true? I mean, the best comparison to this wouldn't be some kind of pension system. It would be the universal guaranteed income we already have. Yes, we guarantee every citizen a minimum income...as long as they are over 65 :-) Most of them would probably keep working in some capacity if they didn't lose their benefits.

luisfmh 1y ago

The system that is killing our planet, that exploits and ends up killing the majority of its unwilling participants? Yeah, I don't think the loss in productivity will be a bad thing. Maybe people will consider the effect of their work before doing it a little more when they don't have a gun to their head.

TFYS 1y ago

> And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained? I think people and markets would just adapt to a lower level of consumption and amount of work. The work that people find truly important, like growing food, construction of housing, healthcare, etc. would remain in demand. The demand for things that people don't really want to work to create, or work to consume, would be reduced. So salaries for work that actually matters to people would increase and people would still do that work, and salaries for work that produces things that people don't really need would be reduced. In the end we'd have a society that only does the work that people actually want and need to get done and consume only things that have enough value to justify working for it. Less work, less consumption, probably happier people.

tukantje 1y ago

Elderly population not working is _hardly_ the equivalent of UBI. Besides; in most developed countries you are actually _penalized_ for working while retired; and furthermore most elderly people on pension tend to still do work such as handling childcare for grand kids.

tharga8616 1y ago

What do you expect after a life of forced labour? Do they stop helping their families on the daily tasks? I think these questions should clarify your thoughts.