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> With Unconditional Basic Income it is always beneficial to work. Exactly. A UBI would encourage people to work, since working just means you make more money.

> With Unconditional Basic Income it is always beneficial to work. Exactly. A UBI would encourage people to work, since working just means you make more money. The biggest drawback of the current system in the US is that it penalizes you for working: if you start to make more money, your benefits go away and you might as well have not started working.

dllthomas 13y ago
Strictly, a transition to UBI from conditional assistance would encourage people currently receiving conditional assistance to work. People who are not currently receiving assistance would have a smaller incentive to engage in paid work than at present. This probably has both positive and negative consequences.
- ThomPete 13y ago
  It's not the purpose of UBI to get EVERYONE to work. The purpose is to get as many as possible to work and not have to deal with controlling who "deserves" what, who cheats etc. It's totally fine that some people don't work as long as the majority of people will. In many ways we already have a form of BI today, it's just conditional and have the negative effect of branding people, keeping them in their social status.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    "It's not the purpose of UBI to get EVERYONE to work." Never made any claim - or implication, so far as I can see - that it was. 'The purpose is to get as many as possible to work and not have to deal with controlling who "deserves" what, who cheats etc.' I think the purpose is to ensure that everyone has some basic resources to build upon, to stabilize consumption, to shift power a bit toward labor in the jobs market, and to provide something of a safety net. It is preferable to conditional assistance because it doesn't have any cliffs and there's less room for political nonsense than with targeted assistance, but that's not really the purpose of the program - those are equally attributes of a system with no UBI but also no other welfare programs. "It's totally fine that some people don't work as long as the majority of people will." I agree with the sentiment, not the precise formulation. It is totally fine if some people don't work as long as enough work that we can produce enough to meet demand. What portion of the population that is depends on a whole lot of factors (and in the longest term will probably shrink). I don't see that it has any particular relationship with 50% ("the the majority of the people") - currently it probably needs to be quite a bit more than that. "In many ways we already have a form of BI today, it's just conditional and have the negative effect of branding people, keeping them in their social status." I wouldn't call it "a form of BI", but I would say that many of the supposed evils of BI are already present in our current system.
    - jcalvinowens 13y ago
      > It is totally fine if some people don't work as long as enough work that we can produce enough to meet demand. That's precisely the point: it creates a market for labor that does not currently exist. If there were not enough workers to meet demand, the suppliers would have to increase salaries until enough of them decided the money was worth going to work. A UBI allows natural market forces to do things that we have to do with regulation now. Minimum wage could be eradicated with a UBI, for example, since everybody enough to live on. Real wages for unskilled workers would be forced much higher, which I think would be a very good thing for the economy as a whole.
      - dllthomas 13y ago
        I mostly agree, I think. "That's precisely the point: it creates a market for labor that does not currently exist." I'm not sure how there is not currently a market for labor, it's just presently tilted in favor of employers because employees have too much trouble "going out of business" when there isn't sufficient demand for them. "A UBI allows natural market forces to do things that we have to do with regulation now." Right. "Minimum wage could be eradicated with a UBI, for example, since everybody enough to live on." With a sufficiently high UBI, this is clearly the case; I'm not completely convinced that "a sufficiently high UBI" is not so high that it would cause other problems, though that seems likely. "Real wages for unskilled workers would be forced much higher," Real wages for unskilled workers would certainly rise. Whether they would be "much higher" doubtless depends on the size of the UBI. "which I think would be a very good thing for the economy as a whole." Possibly. It would certainly motivate more automation, which is probably good. Forcing them too high too fast would likely mean some significant problems as society figures out how to adapt.

dllthomas 13y ago

Strictly, a transition to UBI from conditional assistance would encourage people currently receiving conditional assistance to work. People who are not currently receiving assistance would have a smaller incentive to engage in paid work than at present. This probably has both positive and negative consequences.

ThomPete 13y ago
It's not the purpose of UBI to get EVERYONE to work. The purpose is to get as many as possible to work and not have to deal with controlling who "deserves" what, who cheats etc. It's totally fine that some people don't work as long as the majority of people will. In many ways we already have a form of BI today, it's just conditional and have the negative effect of branding people, keeping them in their social status.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  "It's not the purpose of UBI to get EVERYONE to work." Never made any claim - or implication, so far as I can see - that it was. 'The purpose is to get as many as possible to work and not have to deal with controlling who "deserves" what, who cheats etc.' I think the purpose is to ensure that everyone has some basic resources to build upon, to stabilize consumption, to shift power a bit toward labor in the jobs market, and to provide something of a safety net. It is preferable to conditional assistance because it doesn't have any cliffs and there's less room for political nonsense than with targeted assistance, but that's not really the purpose of the program - those are equally attributes of a system with no UBI but also no other welfare programs. "It's totally fine that some people don't work as long as the majority of people will." I agree with the sentiment, not the precise formulation. It is totally fine if some people don't work as long as enough work that we can produce enough to meet demand. What portion of the population that is depends on a whole lot of factors (and in the longest term will probably shrink). I don't see that it has any particular relationship with 50% ("the the majority of the people") - currently it probably needs to be quite a bit more than that. "In many ways we already have a form of BI today, it's just conditional and have the negative effect of branding people, keeping them in their social status." I wouldn't call it "a form of BI", but I would say that many of the supposed evils of BI are already present in our current system.
  - jcalvinowens 13y ago
    > It is totally fine if some people don't work as long as enough work that we can produce enough to meet demand. That's precisely the point: it creates a market for labor that does not currently exist. If there were not enough workers to meet demand, the suppliers would have to increase salaries until enough of them decided the money was worth going to work. A UBI allows natural market forces to do things that we have to do with regulation now. Minimum wage could be eradicated with a UBI, for example, since everybody enough to live on. Real wages for unskilled workers would be forced much higher, which I think would be a very good thing for the economy as a whole.
    - dllthomas 13y ago
      I mostly agree, I think. "That's precisely the point: it creates a market for labor that does not currently exist." I'm not sure how there is not currently a market for labor, it's just presently tilted in favor of employers because employees have too much trouble "going out of business" when there isn't sufficient demand for them. "A UBI allows natural market forces to do things that we have to do with regulation now." Right. "Minimum wage could be eradicated with a UBI, for example, since everybody enough to live on." With a sufficiently high UBI, this is clearly the case; I'm not completely convinced that "a sufficiently high UBI" is not so high that it would cause other problems, though that seems likely. "Real wages for unskilled workers would be forced much higher," Real wages for unskilled workers would certainly rise. Whether they would be "much higher" doubtless depends on the size of the UBI. "which I think would be a very good thing for the economy as a whole." Possibly. It would certainly motivate more automation, which is probably good. Forcing them too high too fast would likely mean some significant problems as society figures out how to adapt.