[HN Gopher] Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available
___________________________________________________________________
Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available
Author : dbroockman
Score : 75 points
Date : 2024-07-22 11:00 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.openresearchlab.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.openresearchlab.org)
| setgree wrote:
| As others have pointed out [0], the summaries have a much more
| positive spin than the accompanying paper [1].
|
| The paper's abstract:
|
| > We study the causal impacts of income on a rich array of
| employment outcomes, leverag-ing an experiment in which 1,000
| low-income individuals were randomized into receiving $1,000 per
| month unconditionally for three years, with a control group of
| 2,000 participants receiving $50/month. We gather detailed survey
| data, administrative records, and data from a custom mobile phone
| app. The transfer caused total individual income to fall by about
| $1,500/year relative to the control group, excluding the
| transfers. The program resulted in a 2.0 percentage point
| decrease in labor market participation for participants and a
| 1.3-1.4 hour per week reduction in labor hours, with
| participants' partners reducing their hours worked by a
| comparable amount. The transfer generated the largest increases
| in time spent on leisure, as well as smaller increases in time
| spent in other activities such as transportation and finances.
| Despite asking detailed questions about amenities, we find no
| impact on quality of employment, and our confidence intervals can
| rule out even small improvements. We observe no significant
| effects on investments in human capital, though younger
| participants may pursue more formal education. Overall, our
| results suggest a moderate labor supply effect that does not
| appear offset by other productive activities.
|
| [0] https://x.com/Afinetheorem/status/1815413121822896270
|
| [1]https://www.openresearchlab.org/findings/nber-working-
| paper-...
| devonsolomon wrote:
| Well that's one less option for when the robots take over...
| mdorazio wrote:
| Link to the preliminary study results from OpenResearch:
| https://www.openresearchlab.org/studies/unconditional-cash-s...
|
| Note that this was a time-limited study where participants knew
| they would only receive money for 3 years. Personally, I feel
| like this leads to different behaviors than if people believe
| they will receive the income indefinitely.
| legitster wrote:
| This is a pretty generous reading of the study.
|
| One result they are missing out is that the income actually
| reduced overall employment compared to the control group, and
| ended up decreasing household earnings:
| https://www.nber.org/papers/w32719
|
| Even with a generous reading, it was an extremely expensive
| study. And similar proposals like the Negative Income Tax would
| cost far less money and have none of the presented downsides.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Negative income tax? Does that mean the government pays me to
| work?
| bell-cot wrote:
| Yes-ish.
|
| But your employer knows. And he might immediately apply
| "you'll need less money from me, now" logic.
| hibikir wrote:
| True, but that part only makes a significant difference if
| the unemployment rate is quite high. At a time where
| restaurants have trouble filling their staff in low tip
| shifts, the salaries are closer to what the employer can
| pay without serious risk.
| tejtm wrote:
| Your employer may already be getting paid by a government
| for you to work, but that is above your pay grade.
| exe34 wrote:
| so it's a handout to companies. corporate welfare. probably
| no worse than currently - a lot of companies in the UK are
| subsidised via the benefits system because their employees
| can't afford to live off their wages.
| rbanffy wrote:
| That's why it should be enough to provide for basic
| subsistence.
| boplicity wrote:
| I think something like this already exists in the U.S. It's
| called the Earned Income Tax Credit. Low income people may
| get a tax credit that could result in a bigger refund.
| Effectively, some people are getting money they woudln't be
| getting without working. It makes a lot of sense, imo.
|
| https://www.irs.gov/publications/p596
| otterley wrote:
| The U.S. Government also pays farmers not to grow crops!
| See, e.g., the Conservation Reserve Program
| (https://www.fsa.usda.gov/programs-and-
| services/conservation-...).
| summerlight wrote:
| Yeap. In fact, it's a more affordable option than UBI and
| already (partially) implemented across several countries.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| NIT and UBI are equivalent if you take income taxes into
| account.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Why is it some shock-horror thing that people worked less? I
| think, for those who imagine AI taking a vast swath of jobs
| (like Altman), the aim for basic income is to get people
| working less but without this resulting social/work
| disengagement (whether AI will have that effect is a different
| matter).
| MattGrommes wrote:
| > Why is it some shock-horror thing that people worked less?
|
| Exactly. If I have to have 3 jobs, then with this money I
| "only" work 2 jobs, I'm working less but almost certainly
| have a better quality of life.
| jacksnipe wrote:
| Yeah and what's more you're contributing more to society,
| whether or not you can measure it in money. You have some
| spare time and energy to help your family, your neighbors,
| the person you see once a week.
|
| I want to live in a society where people have time to
| actually live.
| wolpoli wrote:
| Yup. Individuals want to optimize for quality of life but
| the decisionmakers are optimizing for household income (or
| perhaps GDP).
| blindriver wrote:
| But stress didn't decrease according to the study, so
| it's not like their quality of life increased.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Moreover, it is possible to create value without making
| money.
| heylook wrote:
| In fact often the most efficient, effective, and long-
| lasting value creation has nothing to do with money at all.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| > Why is it some shock-horror thing that people worked less?
|
| Because significant portion of UPI proponents argue that it
| will promote working more and higher productivity. The
| typical argument is that it will remove barriers that prevent
| better worker-job matching.
| jimkoen wrote:
| A significant proportion that is not the majority? I think
| the vibe about UBI was always "people will work less and
| employers will have stricter competition when hiring
| employees".
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| hard to say either way without statistics on actual UBI
| proponents. I would argue most, but my opinion is also
| based on cumulative vibes from vocal proponents like
| Andrew Yang and random internet commenters.
| legitster wrote:
| This strikes me as such an out-of-touch idea right now.
|
| Maybe in the distant future we do not need people to work.
| But we are currently dealing with the largest retiree
| population our country has ever had, and more money chasing
| after fewer goods and services nearly crippled our economy
| with stagflation. It takes two weeks to get a plumber right
| now in our area.
|
| If you also hope to implement UBI nationwide, you need some
| expectation that it pays for itself with productivity gains.
| Otherwise it will all get inflated away into nothing.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > Why is it some shock-horror thing that people worked less?
|
| Working less is not so bad, but their income (before
| transfers) also went down. That means they did not replace
| poorly paying jobs with better paying ones (or they did with
| net decrease), nor started a business.
|
| The issue is that social safety net is meant for people who's
| income is seemingly too low. If the net effect is to decrease
| that even lower, then yes its a concern.
|
| (for clarity, I read the link not the paper)
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's not a surprise to most people, but UBI proponents often
| explain the unworkable economics by saying it would make
| people earn more... or something.
|
| I don't think realists really needed any evidence that normal
| people would love to quit their job and play computer games
| all day, but I guess this study wasn't for them.
| altruios wrote:
| YES!!!!
|
| Not every job is moral, essential or needed, the idea that
| 'everyone needs to participate with American capitalism as a
| worker drone' needs to die.
| marcusverus wrote:
| > everyone needs to participate with American capitalism as a
| worker drone
|
| Working a job you don't like is a leaser evil than mooching
| off of your neighbors. The level of entitlement required to
| argue the opposite is absolutely mind boggling.
|
| How many people have to work full time to support one able-
| bodied layabout?
|
| UBI may make sense in the event of technology-induced mass
| unemployment, but folks won't tolerate it otherwise. The
| incentives are simply and universally too bass-ackwards for
| society to function. They're backwards for the idle (who will
| find it easier to cut costs than work), for new graduates
| (who can split living costs with friends and delay entry into
| the workforce indefinitely), for workers (who would rather
| rent a trailer and chill than work 40 hours a week and live
| in the 'burbs and drive a new truck), and for politicians
| (who will shamelessly promise endless increases in benefits).
|
| IMO UBI is a litmus test for basement dwellers, unserious
| utopians and plain-old first-order thinkers.
| 8note wrote:
| > new graduates (who can split living costs with friends
| and delay entry into the workforce indefinitely),
|
| This one at least, and probably all of them is stuff that
| already happens, and their time spent not working is
| instead spent on improving their communities. I think
| that's still valuable, and maybe more valueable than making
| a billionaire slightly richer
|
| Ubi compensates all work, rather than just what capitalists
| are willing to pay for. Id expect a good portion of
| software engineers to quit in a UBI world, so they can do
| open source projects instead.
|
| The second order effect of putting everyone in the
| workforce is that nobody is having kids, and there's no
| community support for people on the edge of homelessness,
| or with mental health issues, or with drug issues.
| altruios wrote:
| Working a job you don't like isn't the issue.
|
| Working a job that makes the world a worse place because
| you need to survive is the issue.
|
| It IS less evil to do nothing and be fed than to take up
| arms in a factory that produces produces that people want,
| but is poison (cigarettes, as an example). Paying people to
| prevent exploitation from plantation owners is a good
| thing.
| legitster wrote:
| "From each according to his ability, to each according to his
| needs" - Karl Marx.
|
| It's not an inherent function of capitalism. If anything,
| Marx himself actually pitched communism as boosting overall
| productivity of society by putting bourgeois to work.
| Detrytus wrote:
| This stupid adage by Marx has to die. It never works.
|
| For one, some people have extraordinary abilities, and will
| be pissed off if, in exchange for their extraordinary
| contributions, they only got the income "according to their
| needs", as defined by government. This basically takes away
| all the motivation to excel at something.
|
| Also, the masses would be discontent because their
| perceived "needs" are much bigger that their actual ability
| to produce anything. This is partially remedied by
| capitalism, where the "greedy capitalist" basically forces
| them to work harder than they would out of their own free
| will.
| altruios wrote:
| I think you might be mistaken about the ratio of the
| average person's needs/abilities... a probing question
| is: do we really need telemarketers to continue to exist
| (just so people have jobs... and that's better that
| people receive unwanted calls... because?)?
|
| Greed is greed and shouldn't be rewarded.
|
| I otherwise basically agree with you... just that most
| people are basically able and society doesn't need to do
| things arbitrarily if there is a better (more direct)
| way...
|
| We don't need to be in a constant state of
| production/consumption - we can take a break and still
| feed people. We throw out food if we aren't selling it
| because we'd rather let people starve than get a free
| loaf of bread... which really just stems from a lack of
| imagination and empathy.
|
| Let's imagine a better world. Imagine and make it so.
| legitster wrote:
| I was not at all advocating for Marx or that quote.
|
| I'm just pointing out that it's largely a universal truth
| that if we want a functioning society with food and roads
| and electricity and houses and internet, a lot of people
| are going to have to do something they would rather not
| do.
|
| The "greedy capitalist" is more about how the work is
| coordinated. We have a market-based system where work
| assignments are more or less voluntary where he who signs
| the checks sets the work. But I am not volunteering
| myself to going back to a manorial or subsistence
| agriculture society.
| thomasahle wrote:
| It's literally the second paragraph:
|
| > They also worked less on average but remained engaged in the
| workforce and were more deliberate in their job searches
| compared with a control group.
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| so they were more picky? I dont think that's intrinsically
| good or bad, but it seems concordant with the finding in
| unemployment studies that a large proportion of unemployed
| workers who get a fixed period of unemployment payments end
| up finding a job in the last month when the payment is about
| to end. Which raises the question, should you make the period
| shorter to reduce financial burden of unemployment insurance
| on workers, or longer to allow workers to be even more
| "deliberate" about their employment choices?
| whakim wrote:
| > And similar proposals like the Negative Income Tax would cost
| far less money and have none of the presented downsides.
|
| It all depends on how you tweak the numbers; in theory a
| negative income tax and a guaranteed income cost exactly the
| same amount. A guaranteed income of $1200 taxed at a marginal
| rate of 50% is just the same as a marginal tax rate of -50% on
| an income of $400. That being said, there are some pretty big
| negative externalities to a negative income tax, in the sense
| that it even further overburdens the tax system with knowing
| people's exact monthly income (assuming monthly payments),
| which is not-at-all straightforward for the poorest taxpayers
| whom presumably such a system would be designed to most help.
| pjerem wrote:
| > One result they are missing out is that the income actually
| reduced overall employment compared to the control group
|
| That's not something negative or even a surprise. Of all the
| people on this planet, why do you think Altman payed its with
| its own money for this study ? That's the goal of universal
| income : allowing people to work less because there is/will be
| less work to do.
|
| As for decreasing household earnings, I'm not even surprised :
| most people would accept a decrease in income in exchange of
| the certainty of the income. You don't need to save a lot if
| your income is guaranteed.
|
| It's not even a bad thing because as we can see in the results,
| global expenditures increased. One interpretation could be that
| people felt like they needed less money but that they also
| spent more. Overall it feels like a net positive for the
| economy.
| Mehvix wrote:
| is/will there be less to do?
|
| in the future, maybe so, but decreasing employment is surely
| bad during a labor shortage: you do need workers for a
| functioning, productive economy.
|
| the rise in buying power may look good by the numbers, but
| doesn't inherently better society -- consumerism doesn't
| encourage quality goods/services. take AI: it's a lot easier
| to replace human workers when they've quit, when the
| positions are already vacant. you don't need to provide on-
| par performance or quality service(s), just fill the shoes
| with slop
| Willish42 wrote:
| > And similar proposals like the Negative Income Tax would cost
| far less money and have none of the presented downsides.
|
| Most people file taxes once a year, meaning they would get this
| payment once rather than monthly, which makes a huge difference
| if living on the poverty line. Similarly, many people making
| less than the minimum for filing [1] likely don't file their
| taxes. This was an issue with the child tax credit as well --
| you want to get resources to the lowest-income households, but
| doing that with tax credits means you don't actually reach
| those households, meaning you still have to introduce new
| programs to reach those people [2]. There were proposals to
| make that tax credit into a monthly payment but IIRC they did
| not pass before the child tax credit was ended in 2022.
|
| [1] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/who-needs-to-file-a-tax-return
| [2] https://www.vox.com/22588701/child-tax-credit-
| accessibility-...
| legitster wrote:
| I understand the pragmatic barriers to onboarding or bi-
| monthly payments via NIT, but it still seems easier to
| overcome these barriers than institute a domestic UBI.
| bko wrote:
| I agree that something like a negative income tax would be
| cheaper with fewer downsides. But it would be spun as
| "subsidizing Walmart". You see that today when politicians
| criticize part time Walmart employees for still being eligible
| for benefits.
|
| Imagine if some low wage employer could pay you $10 an hours
| and government throws in an extra $5. If the market clearing
| rate is $15 for an employee, giving a subsidy of $5 pushes the
| wage down to $10 (effectively $10). They could offer $15
| (effectively $20), but then you have a misalignment of quantity
| supplied and quantity demand, which would result in too many
| applicants and having to select on non-economic terms (e.g.
| overpaid do-nothing internship going to the CEO's nephew)
| ericjmorey wrote:
| Caring for loved ones is a tremendous value enhancement that is
| entirely missing in any study looking at income and profits.
| Someone who loves to cook cooking for someone that loves
| sharing a home cooked meal with the person that cooked it is
| entirely valueless in any such interpretation of income and
| profits being the sole measure for evaluating value. Delivery
| food services are the most valuable forms of sustenance in such
| measures.
|
| So did these people decrease their earnings because they were
| able to do more of what they value the most? Is that a thing we
| should try to make more people capable of doing?
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah - this suggests the simple explanation is true, if you
| reduce the incentive to work then people work less.
|
| There is a lot of speculation that that's not the case, but it
| doesn't seem to really hold up.
|
| This comes up a lot in lefty politics imo - similar to people
| arguing (erroneously) that increasing housing supply raises
| rents or reducing crime enforcement reduces crime. The
| simpler/dumber causality around incentives seems more true in
| all of these cases, the complicated second order theories fail
| to hold up.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| The UBI folks were cursed by the pandemic and inflation. You
| cannot deal with that confounder.
|
| They're not the only ones. Remember Green New Deal? That also
| evaporated with the end of ZIRP.
|
| You can complain relentlessly about these guys, or offer
| alternative solution with nothing but vibes to vouch for them.
| The truth is, as long as interest rates are high, the economic
| contraction is making everyone too scared to try anything in case
| things "get worse." Sadly, the best time to make great social
| change was between 2009 and 2022 and it's officially over now.
| verteu wrote:
| > The UBI folks were cursed by the pandemic and inflation. You
| cannot deal with that confounder.
|
| The study had a control group, who also experienced pandemic &
| inflation.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| You can do whatever you want during periods of inflation.
| "It" will fail. The existence of a control group is
| meaningless. The control group will have bad outcomes too. So
| what if it does? Nobody can design interventions for periods
| of inflation, because inflation makes everything look bad:
| your outcome, control group's outcomes, everyone's outcomes.
|
| For example, Brazil created their current public health
| system in 1988, realizing it in 1990, during inflation that
| was between 1,000-2,000%. It wasn't really functional then.
| Looking at it in isolation, at the time it was created, it
| would look like a failure, but all of Brazil looked like "a
| failure." Would it be valid to use SUS as implemented during
| 1,000% inflation as an example of why public health insurance
| is bad? No way.
| legitster wrote:
| > Remember Green New Deal
|
| This went along with the death of Modern Monetary Theory.
| reillys wrote:
| It's such a small amount of money per person that it is hard to
| see what effects one would expect. I think for the majority of
| people reading hacker news $1000 per month would be barely
| noticeable in their bank account (obviously some people out there
| would notice it, but for say a lowly software dev making $150k
| it's not going to change much about their lifestyle). So to think
| it would fundamentally change someones life is a stretch. I mean
| it's not enough to not have to earn money (and so have the
| financial security to start a company or restart education) and
| it's not enough to purchase accommodation (especially cause it's
| limited to 3 years). Most I would expect is people could pay down
| some of their debt - so they can tread water a little easier for
| a few years.
| reillys wrote:
| not sure why this is downvoted? It's basically the exact same
| comment as the top comment
| causi wrote:
| I don't understand why all of the basic income studies I've seen
| seek to indicate whether or not giving someone free money
| improves their quality of life. That it does should be blindingly
| obvious, but that is not the question which determines whether
| basic income should be a political goal. _That_ question is
| whether basic income is the _best_ use of a given amount of
| public assistance funding. Whether it is more efficient at
| improving lives than alternatives such as food stamps, rent
| assistance, childcare assistance, etc. There seem to be no
| efforts to answer this essential question.
| jeffbee wrote:
| But this study is showing no benefits, at least to mental and
| physical health, educational attainment, and advancement at
| work. So it seems to sort of moot the latter question.
| causi wrote:
| Yes, and that's quite a surprising result, but even if it'd
| had the opposite results, it wouldn't indicate that UBI is a
| good idea.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >That question is whether basic income is the best use of a
| given amount of public assistance funding. Whether it is more
| efficient at improving lives than alternatives such as food
| stamps, rent assistance, childcare assistance, etc. There seem
| to be no efforts to answer this essential question.
|
| Honestly, it's sorta self evident that replacing a myriad of
| confusing and contradictory systems with one system is more
| efficient. We effectively have UBI already for a subset of the
| population and it not efficient at all because it's provided
| through a ton of different programs that all different
| regulations and inclusion parameters.
| superfrank wrote:
| I'm not sure how to address this, but I always wonder how much we
| can extrapolate the findings from these studies to a universal
| basic income situation. I feel like giving a small group of
| people an extra $12000 a year provides benefits for low income
| people because their yearly income is now higher compared to the
| median income. Someone who's income is in the 5th percentile may
| now be in the 10th or 15th percentile (no idea if those numbers
| are correct).
|
| Once you give everybody an extra $12000 a year, the median income
| is now $12000 higher. I'm sure there's still some benefit, but
| relative to others their position hasn't changed. Someone who's
| yearly income is in the 5th percentile is still earning in the
| 5th percentile.
|
| I'm concerned about a situation similar to college tuition in the
| US where easy, risk free money leads to price gouging. Once
| everyone has an extra $XXXXX how quickly does the market realize
| that the cost of goods can be raised by that amount.
| thesz wrote:
| With a progressive taxation, the gap between high and low
| income narrows. Low income people may not even notice a change
| in tax bracket, if any such thing happen, high income people
| will give back a substantial part of that additional income. I
| believe, up to 50+% in some US states.
|
| This may slightly change median, I think.
| rbanffy wrote:
| It's also worthwhile to reduce taxation at the lowest end, as
| long as the extra taxes are used to provide basic human
| rights such as universal and comprehensive healthcare.
| superfrank wrote:
| Is UBI a necessary part of progressive taxation? Maybe I'm
| missing something, but it seems like that same thing can be
| accomplished without UBI. Am I thinking about that wrong?
| rvrs wrote:
| Can you do me a quick favor and Google what progressive
| taxation means?
| thesz wrote:
| I do not know. I just pointed out that progressive taxation
| makes UBI more sensible in the "more equitable society"
| sense.
|
| But I do not like the notion of "more equitable society" at
| all. I do not think it is fair or useful.
| theLiminator wrote:
| > I'm concerned about a situation similar to college tuition in
| the US where easy, risk free money leads to price gouging. Once
| everyone has an extra $XXXXX how quickly does the market
| realize that the cost of goods can be raised by that amount.
|
| Yeah, I'm convinced state backed student loans has led to the
| crazy rise in college tuition. student loans should be private
| (but should 100% be dischargeable via bankruptcy).
| Alternatively, public institutions shouldn't charge for
| tuition. The current state makes absolutely no sense.
| Suppafly wrote:
| > student loans should be private (but should 100% be
| dischargeable via bankruptcy)
|
| While I mostly agree, how do you prevent basically every
| student from going bankrupt immediately after graduation?
| None of the downsides to bankruptcy really apply to students
| so it's logically the best course of action if students loans
| could be discharged.
| heylook wrote:
| I'm not convinced you would need to. "Students" cease to be
| students immediately after graduation, so they wouldn't
| really be "students" anymore, right? So "none of the
| downsides to bankruptcy really apply to students" doesn't
| really seem accurate, does it?
|
| Even reading it more charitably, students and recent
| graduates still probably would like access to credit cards,
| or the housing rental market, or whatever. Bankruptcies
| stick with you for 7(?) years, so you'd also have to think
| about whether you'd be locked out of the mortgage market,
| auto loan market, what-have-you, while your peers are able
| to make those moves.
|
| Bankruptcies are also like a whole legal thing with a judge
| and everything, so I doubt we'd see every single student
| getting their whole debt discharged instead of a judge just
| being like "Didn't you, like, just spend all this money on
| getting the training required to get a high-paying job?
| Seems like if you plan on working anytime soon you should
| make some payments."
|
| Also lenders can just like, be more selective or
| restrictive in other ways? Higher interest rates, requiring
| more established co-signers, etc etc etc. Honestly the
| strangest part of this is that we've normalized saddling 18
| year-olds with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of
| debt.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| If you make student loans dischargeable and private, wouldn't
| lenders would tighten up and only give loans to people with
| good odds of repaying the loans? IE, people from middle
| class+ could still get loans, but how about the smart kid
| from a very poor family? Wouldn't they be too risky to give a
| massive loan to?
| theLiminator wrote:
| There might need to be some regulations made so that
| lenders should discount family background, but only
| consider grades/earnings potential/etc.
|
| But on the plus side, this should theoretically bring
| tuition costs down as there won't be effectively unlimited
| capital for tuition. It also encourages potential students
| to consider more carefully whether getting a degree makes
| sense.
|
| Perhaps Pell Grants should also be expanded in eligibility
| (to make it so that more poor, but motivated kids can get
| access to higher education).
|
| The goal of these changes would be to: - Reduce the market
| distortions that are created by giving out federally backed
| student loans (reducing or at the minimum slowing the pace
| of growth of tuition costs) - Reduce the burden on
| taxpayers by eliminating public student loans - Makes it so
| that kids don't get stuck with student loans that are a
| drag on them for life, at worst, they'll have to deal with
| bankruptcy
|
| Potential downsides: - Reduces number of people studying
| potentially useful/valuable to society degrees that don't
| have much expected monetary return - Potentially reduces
| average level of education in the population (could be
| untrue if it also sufficiently reduces tuition costs)
| superfrank wrote:
| > Yeah, I'm convinced state backed student loans has led to
| the crazy rise in college tuition
|
| I'm think it's pretty widely accepted that this is at least
| partially true.
| aeturnum wrote:
| > _Someone who 's yearly income is in the 5th percentile is
| still earning in the 5th percentile._
|
| Isn't this an intended feature of UBI? The idea of UBI is that
| some level of material support should be guaranteed. It's about
| bringing "up" the floor, not really re-arranging relative equal
| and unequal positions. Plenty of people dislike that about it,
| but it's an intended feature.
|
| That said, this is basically inflationary pressure and we have
| a lot of tools to deal with inflationary pressure. It is a
| challenge, but I am always struck by how differently people
| speak about it in this context v.s. when average incomes rise
| because the labor market is doing better. On some level,
| average incomes going up across society is the most normal
| thing in the world for welfare state capitalism and is one of
| the challenges we are best-equipped to deal with.
| superfrank wrote:
| > Isn't this an intended feature of UBI? The idea of UBI is
| that some level of material support should be guaranteed.
| It's about bringing "up" the floor, not really re-arranging
| relative equal and unequal positions. Plenty of people
| dislike that about it, but it's an intended feature.
|
| Absolutely, but I guess I don't see how just giving everyone
| money brings that floor up. Maybe I'm looking at this
| naively, but I don't see what's preventing things from just
| costing more after UBI. If the government gives everyone
| $1000/mo so landlords raise rent by $1000/mo then the floor
| is unchanged. I realize it's not that simple and that type of
| inflation wouldn't happen over night, but it seems like
| that's the direction it would head. Just looking at the
| housing aspect of it, it actually seems like the people who
| would benefit the most from UBI would be the people at the
| middle to upper end of the wage scale since they are more
| likely to own a house which means their housing costs are
| more fixed than someone renting.
|
| To me it seems like we need some way to control the cost of
| basic needs otherwise it's just a constant race between the
| government raising UBI and the market raising prices
| (although, admittedly, it seems like the same argument could
| be made about minimum wage).
|
| This is definitely not something I'm super well versed in
| though, so I might be looking at it wrong and am very open to
| people showing me what I'm missing.
| aeturnum wrote:
| That's super fair and I think you are absolutely right that
| it's an obvious question. Generally when people get more
| money for some reason the people who they buy from don't
| know it - but in this case they would know it! It would be
| foolish to ignore it.
|
| I don't have a pat answer to your concerns, but I also want
| you to think about what stops your landlord from raising
| your rent by $1000 / month right now. Like, why not just go
| for it? Unless there's rent control it's allowed. The
| classic "efficient markets" answer is that providing
| housing does have underlying costs and, though people
| having more money does tend to lead prices to go up,
| sellers are still competing for buyers. At least
| historically, even in boom economic times, housing costs
| did not 100% stay even with rising incomes (which is just
| what this is).
|
| That said, us housing has been getting worse for most
| people for a long time. House costs have outpaced inflation
| for 60 years[1]. Rents are even worse[2]. Reporting
| suggests this is now being made worse by highly
| concentrated rental conglomerates[3]. That is to say that
| the cost of these services is not tied to how much money
| people have to pay for them - your scenario where landlords
| just raise prices to new income levels is actually
| optimistic. There's also practical evidence that local
| factors and competition will lead prices to go down under
| "the right" local conditions[4].
|
| So I think my answer is that your concern is based on an
| idealized economic model, but the actual trends US in
| housing haven't really been following the economic ideal
| for some time. I don't think all gains from UBI would be
| snapped up by raising prices, but like all inflation we'd
| lose some! Overall, to me, the weakness here is that the
| study doesn't show that many benefits for a ~40% (!!)
| increase in income. Which seems WILD. Just not what you
| would expect at all.
|
| [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/19/why-home-prices-have-
| risen-f...
|
| [2] https://www.realestatewitch.com/rent-to-income-
| ratio-2022/
|
| [3] https://accountable.us/watchdog-major-landlord-
| companies-con...
|
| [4] https://sfist.com/2024/03/29/report-sf-rents-still-
| coming-do...
| superfrank wrote:
| > I also want you to think about what stops your landlord
| from raising your rent by $1000 / month right now. Like,
| why not just go for it?
|
| Answering as a landlord (I have one property I used to
| live in that I rent out), the reason I don't just keep
| raising rent is mainly because I like my tenant and want
| to be fair to them. Having had bad tenants in the past, a
| good tenant is worth their weight in gold.
|
| More relevant to your question though, the other reason
| is because I know there's a ceiling after a certain point
| where the number of people who have the money to rent my
| property starts to shrink and the time it would take to
| find a new tenant would cost more than the amount of
| money I would make by raising rent.
|
| If rent is $2000/mo and raising it by $100/mo means it's
| going to take an extra month to find a tenant, then I
| need to believe that that tenant is going to stay for at
| least 20 months to break even.
|
| If everyone all of a sudden has an extra $1000/mo I could
| be fairly certain that my tenant won't be priced out if I
| were to raise rent a few hundred dollars.
| campl3r wrote:
| Globalization/imports and competition prevents many prices
| from raising as much as the floor is raised.
|
| granted this doesn't work for all goods, such as housing,
| but even then you would be better of with it just working
| for some goods.
| ilaksh wrote:
| $1000 is not enough to quit their jobs or get a nice apartment.
| They could move slightly closer to work if they have to commute.
|
| It's not enough for a real tuition or to support them to study
| instead of work.
|
| I don't think we've ever had a universal basic income test. We
| have always missed the universal and basic part. It's below basic
| and not at all universal.
|
| I suspect that you need to get international cooperation and a
| more sophisticated form of money and resource tracking for a real
| UBI to be feasible.
| tomr75 wrote:
| At those levels you just get inflation
| edoceo wrote:
| But even w/o these levels we get inflation? How could we
| compare it to the recent inflation which has been labelled as
| "greed-flation" and "shrink-flation" ?
| lifeisgood99 wrote:
| Inflation is not an on/off switch.
| beejiu wrote:
| People have different definitions of UBI, but in my mind
| 'basic' doesn't translate to quitting your job and not working.
| People in a functioning society still have to work.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > People in a functioning society still have to work
|
| Why?
| williamcotton wrote:
| Really?
| rco8786 wrote:
| Seriously?
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Because until we have unlimited robots with AGI, stuff
| needs to get done for the society to function. Growing
| food, building stuff, delivering stuff, fixing/maintaining
| stuff, etc.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I appreciate the honest answer to what was a bit of a
| provocation.
|
| Can we assume a fraction of people would still be doing
| these relevant things and that it'd be enough to maintain
| a functioning society? If not, wouldn't that point
| towards the directions we need technology to evolve?
| Would paying more to the people who now don't need to
| work, but are willing to, suffice?
|
| One thing I would bet on is that, in that scenario,
| degrading working conditions (as we frequently see in
| agriculture, transportation, etc) would make it harder to
| find people willing to subject themselves to them.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Cards on the table: I think the vast majory of people
| would do less, and perhaps very little socially
| productive work without the current financial incentives.
|
| > Would paying more to the people who now don't need to
| work, but are willing to, suffice?
|
| This is not possible because you cant simultaneously pay
| workers more (as a whole) and have them subsidize the
| non-working.
|
| I admit it may be possible to reallocate compensation
| among the workers so that some get more, while
| collectively they get less.
| nehal3m wrote:
| > Cards on the table: I think the vast majory of people
| would do less, and perhaps very little socially
| productive work without the current financial incentives.
|
| I don't disagree, but aren't you implicitly admitting
| here that the vast majority of people don't want to spend
| their lives doing work? We get a few laps around the sun,
| once, before we return to oblivion. It seems a tragedy to
| me to force almost everyone into spending that brief
| spark of life on the drudgery of increasing shareholder
| value.
|
| If you agree, would you then also say that it would be in
| humanity's interest to work toward a situation where
| people can lead happy, fulfilling lives? I'm not saying I
| have any answers, but I am saying that implicit in your
| own assumption is a problem that needs solving.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I agree with everything you said except the shareholder
| value part.
|
| people dont want to spend their lives doing work, but
| they do want to spend their lives consuming. If you
| eliminate the shareholders and shares, it still take the
| same amount of work to produce what we consume, so this
| wont help reduce work.
|
| In the 1930s, Keynes imagined that humans would live
| lives of leisure as productivity doubled every 20 years.
| However, the human hunger for material comforts is
| bottomless.
|
| The only offramp from work is reducing consumption or 2)
| freezing consumption (assuming productivity increases)
| kamarg wrote:
| > it still take the same amount of work to produce what
| we consume
|
| Does it? Seems like if we don't have excess value going
| to shareholders, less work could be done to provide the
| current level of value for things people are consuming.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Value isnt the same thing as labor/work. This would
| change where the value goes, not the amount of work done.
|
| A restaurant needs X hours of labor to make Y hamburgers.
| This is true if all the money goes to workers, or just a
| fraction of it.
|
| You could pay a worker more, but that doesn't increase
| the supply of hamburgers.
|
| Inversely, any value tied up in the share price is not
| being spent on hamburgers.
|
| The best you can hope to do is shift some consumption
| from investors to workers, but consumption differences
| are as great as wealth/value differentials. e.g. Musk &
| Bezos might have 1 million times as much value to their
| name, but they don't consume 1 million times as many
| hamburgers. The vast majority of excess value held by
| investors is not directed towards consumption.
| nehal3m wrote:
| > The vast majority of excess value held by investors is
| not directed towards consumption.
|
| So why does it need to be created in the first place
| then? That takes work that apparently does not need to
| happen for any other reason than economic, not because it
| is valuable in and of itself.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| People dont want to work but they want the benefits of
| other peoples labor. Simultaneously they try to fight the
| automation that would lead to a world were humans dont
| need to work for things to exist
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| "Increasing shareholder value" is a meme.
|
| In both the US and UK over 30% of households are owned
| outright with no mortgage.
|
| The economy is made up of us, it's not (predominantly) a
| downtrodden serving a tiny elite.
|
| Most people work and do useful stuff for each other. Yes,
| there are bullshit jobs, but it's a huge exaggeration to
| pretend they all are.
| nehal3m wrote:
| Alright, I'll concede the numbers, let's say some
| fraction of people are employed not because they see
| value in their work but because they're economically
| incentivised (in other words, to make ends meet). I'm
| saying that given the choice, those who are forced into
| spending their time in a way that is detrimental to
| themselves in any other term but economic would not do
| so, and furthermore, that humanity owes it to itself to
| remedy that situation in order to maximise for fulfilled
| lives. That is if you agree that societal progress means
| making people's lives better, and that spending one's
| time meaningfully is a good measure of better.
|
| What I'm not saying is all work is horseshit and let's
| all party.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Which of those jobs do the people in this thread have?
| Are they doing anything for the society to function? Does
| the income level reflect that?
| RHSeeger wrote:
| That's a loaded question. Presumably you have a person
| that needs food. On order for that person to get food in
| our society, you need (lets focus on grown food for now)
|
| - People that plant things
|
| - People that harvest things (may be the same people, but
| maybe not)
|
| - People that a order things to be planted (seeds)
|
| - People that order/plan short term things to facilitate
| planting (fertilizer)
|
| - People that make those short term things (who other
| industry, lots of people)
|
| - People that order/plan long term things to facilitate
| planting (tractor)
|
| - People that maintain long term things to facilitate
| planting (repair men)
|
| - People that build systems to allow ordering of short
| term things
|
| - People that build systems to allow ordering/renting/use
| of long term things
|
| - People that build systems to allow finding people that
| maintain long term things
|
| - People that handle making sure those ^ people have the
| infrastrucure they need (government + industry)
|
| - People that handle making sure those ^ people get hired
| and paid
|
| We are WAY beyond "in order to get food for people, we
| need Doug the farmer". So yes, a LOT of the people
| participating in this thread are in the set of people
| that are responsible for making sure people, as a whole,
| have access to food.
|
| And food is only _one_ of the things needed for a society
| to function
| eamsen wrote:
| To add value to society?
| rbanffy wrote:
| Why is value needed? How much of it is sufficient for
| society to function?
|
| Yes, it IS a provocation. Let's go deeper into this
| question.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think it is because people consuming social value
| without adding to it leads to division and fracturing of
| that society.
|
| More simply, value production is needed because value
| consumption is occurring.
| eamsen wrote:
| Value production is needed, because the value we produce
| is fleeting and healthy societies grow.
|
| How much value is needed is determined by the society
| through a free market.
| falcolas wrote:
| How much value can a disabled veteran provide to the free
| market? If that value is zero, should they just lay down
| and die?
|
| What if they're not a veteran, but just an unfortunate
| soul with a disability that provides "zero" value?
| eamsen wrote:
| A healthy society produces surplus to provide for those
| who depend on others. To ensure enough surplus, everyone
| who is able, should add value.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _How much value can a disabled veteran provide to the
| free market? If that value is zero, should they just lay
| down and die?_
|
| If you do this you stop getting new veterans.
| Functionally speaking this is why every society with
| armies has veteran benefits.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| I agree, and I think there are more nuanced and
| meaningful historical and especially modern reasons we
| encourage veterans to turn swords to ploughshares.
|
| It's reasonable to assume that the powers that be may
| find themselves in situations politically precarious if
| veterans aren't able to provide for themselves and those
| they ostensibly fought for. Veterans know where real and
| metaphorical bodies are buried, they also know that at a
| nation scale, the internal problems that face first world
| nations are usually not logistical, but political. If not
| for fear of disrupting business interests, UBI in the
| form of food stamps, housing, and Medicare for all is
| possible. The veterans know this, because they are fed
| and housed and medically treated at scale during and
| after service. However, if everyone receives these same
| benefits also without service obligations, the ability to
| offer incentives to service is limited.
|
| UBI is a thorny issue due to the complexities of
| implementing it piecemeal alongside the already-existing
| status quo. In some ways, a greenfield solution would be
| easier, but they call those revolutionary changes
| revolutions rather than evolutions for good reasons.
|
| Some stray links for food for thought:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_to_ploughshares
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _there are more nuanced and meaningful historical and
| especially modern reasons we encourage veterans to turn
| swords to ploughshares_
|
| Oh, I always thought it was a reference to the Roman
| practice of settling veterans on farmsteads [1].
|
| > _if everyone receives these same benefits also without
| service obligations, the ability to offer incentives to
| service is limited_
|
| I'm not sure we could offer VA benefits to every adult
| without massively raising taxes. (Also, we treat our
| veterans quite poorly.)
|
| [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/41342861
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Citizenship and a form of retirement through service is a
| time-honored military tradition, it's true.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38586918
|
| > I'm not sure we could offer VA benefits to every adult
| without massively raising taxes.
|
| If we eliminated waste and slippage/loss and gained
| efficiencies of scale by eliminating private health
| insurance obligations except for high net worth, like is
| done in some countries like Australia, I think we could
| come out ahead actually, due to reducing the cost of
| employment borne by businesses, while maintaining or
| increasing health outcomes for those on public healthcare
| rolls.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(Australia)
|
| > (Also, we treat our veterans quite poorly.)
|
| To our great collective shame. That being a veteran is
| essentially a greater risk factor for peacetime
| structural violence in the form of homelessness, food
| insecurity, and lack of health care is a travesty only
| eclipsed by the how commonplace these issues are among
| fellow countrymen who are merely civilians.
|
| What is this grand democratic experiment even _for_ , if
| we still suffer from the same failure modes as that which
| we originally fought to save ourselves from?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _What is this grand democratic experiment even for, if
| we still suffer from the same failure modes as that which
| we originally fought to save ourselves from?_
|
| We treat our veterans poorly, but let's not lose
| perspective, that's still far better than most countries
| today or in history.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Veterans in countries with free college and health care
| for all, such as Australia or many European countries
| have it better still, as they receive their veterans
| benefits, while allowing those who did not or could not
| serve to also live free from undue burden or peril.
|
| I do take your point, though, and don't protest too much.
| It's less a matter of how much is enough for our
| veterans, but rather, how far we have left to go, one and
| all. In many ways, veterans simply arrived at the limits
| of political capital before the rest of us, and now that
| the problems veterans face are similarly butting up
| against many if not all in some form or fashion, we have
| economic capital concerns in the form of UBI that has
| become the stalking horse for larger structural issues
| largely left unaddressed facing us all.
| photonthug wrote:
| Another comment mentions land grants and swords to plows
| in antiquity. Lots of those vets weren't super happy with
| the offering at the time since it moved them out to the
| frontiers where they'd feel less threatening to the
| republic, sure, but idk, a actual land grant seems better
| than token assistance of a loan for housing that remains
| pretty unaffordable.
|
| Education assistance is more substantial maybe, but then
| again that's something much of the civilized world enjoys
| without the threat of being blown up by ieds far from
| home in a pointless conflict.
|
| Indeed though, let's not lose perspective, let's take a
| hard honest look at things and ask ourselves whether
| we're doing better or worse.
|
| The military is one of the best available options to lift
| people up out of poverty and give them a better chance at
| life, and it always has been. but it's also a chance at
| no life at all, and so if people are forced into making
| this desperate bargain then it is disgraceful and
| reflects badly on what we've actually accomplished with
| all the time since antiquity.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Why is value needed? How much of it is sufficient for
| society to function?_
|
| As much as people want. A subsistence lifestyle is
| incredibly cheap and accessible; most of us just don't
| want it.
| godshatter wrote:
| Because I want to live in an interplanetary society with
| awesome tech and flying cars and holodecks and life
| extending medicines and who-knows-what-else and we're not
| going to get there if people are content to sit around in
| their nondescript 1-person apartments eating pre-packaged
| meals and the occasional weekly piece of cake and play
| Call of Duty or watch YouTube all day.
| throwawa14223 wrote:
| What's my incentive for subsidizing non-work in others?
| rbanffy wrote:
| Knowing that it doesn't matter how badly you screw up,
| you'll always be able to cover your most basic needs.
|
| This is one. We should go deeper into this question. I
| most certainly would continue doing a lot of the things I
| do now, but for fun and to progress the state-of-the-art
| in my field of work. I'd accept higher taxes in
| compensation for the assurance I will always be able to
| do what I do best, instead of what someone would pay me
| to do.
| Mehvix wrote:
| > > People in a functioning society still have to work
|
| .. to pay taxes for social services.
|
| > I'd accept higher taxes ...
|
| how do you pay for these taxes if you have no job/income?
| hansworst wrote:
| This assumes people just stop doing anything of value if
| there no longer is a proverbial stick in the form of
| financial ruin if they stop working.
|
| Nobody is saying that the carrot (personal financial
| gain) needs to be removed from the equation. Just that
| everyone is guaranteed some basic level of financial
| support.
|
| Society already produces enough wealth to cover the
| expense of UBI. Remember it would replace any other
| welfare systems in place today.
|
| Personally I think I might take a bit more risk, and
| choose to do something that I personally believe is of
| actual value to society rather than please some
| corporation or VC.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it would replace any other welfare systems in place
| today_
|
| I've never seen this math worked out.
|
| Also, some benefits are inherently lumpy. A special-needs
| or chronically-ill person needs (and receives) resources
| that wouldn't be covered by a broad-spectrum UBI.
| blooalien wrote:
| What's your incentive for continuing to eat, drink, and
| breathe once your overlords have fulfilled their greatest
| dream and replaced their need for human labor with robots
| and machines and other forms of automation? Your purpose
| will have been fulfilled and your existence now
| meaningless. That _is_ the ultimate goal we 're all
| working for, right? Being freed from working for our
| overlords so that we can all just lay down and die and
| leave the world to the worst of humanity?
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| "Overlords" are a meme.
|
| In both the US and UK over 30% of households are owned
| outright with no mortgage.
|
| The economy is made up of us, it's not (predominantly) a
| downtrodden serving a tiny elite.
| itronitron wrote:
| You are already subsidizing non-work in others, however
| currently their non-work is at a 'job' that they commute
| to every day.
| wnc3141 wrote:
| I always interpreted the point of the programs as by taking
| immediate insecurity off the table, you are allowing people
| to make more long term decisions for their well being.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| For instance, couples where both partners need a job in a
| fixed location have less mobility than couples where one or
| both can work remotely. Therefore, they are locked into
| their geographic markets, unable to explore better
| opportunities.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| Growing up I was in a negative leverage situation, even
| though I was smart and hardworking I was bled financially
| and I had to spend effort to layer contingency after
| contingency before I could even drive.
|
| This gave my life negative torque, the moment I got a
| little leverage, I stacked up roommates and basically lived
| like a digital ascetic for 12 years.
|
| I ended up in the top 1% of earnings for my starting co-
| hort not because of my fairly average intelligent but
| because of my nearly 100% openness, insane resilience and
| way above average mental health game, and a decade of luck.
|
| I spent all that time and energy getting out of poverty and
| by the time I bought a house and stabilized I was worn out.
|
| The really shitty part is that all along the way I had
| chances and risks that I couldn't take, companies I
| couldn't start, etc. because while any one of those chances
| was a play money/time opportunity for others it would have
| been a bet the farm, burn the ships, might have to squat
| with a bunch of homeless dudes (again) risk for me.
|
| Anything that gives a person the breathing room to stop the
| frantic hunter gatherer subsistence doom spiral and build
| skills is amazing.
|
| Let's let other countries play the economically wasteful
| poverty game, let's let people in other countries die
| deaths of despair during their prime production years but
| if we want to be an advanced technology powerhouse we can't
| keep wasting the potential of all these poor but
| intelligent kids.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > in my mind 'basic' doesn't translate to quitting your job
| and not working
|
| In society A, machines and clean energy allow the population
| to work an average of 20 hours a week. Some, even many people
| choose not to work at all, but still get access to a basic
| apartment and have their basic food, social and education,
| etc, needs met.
|
| In society B, machines and dirty energy allow a tiny segment
| of the population to live on super-yachts, replete with
| airstrips for their private jets. They hire people who hire
| people to convince the majority of the population they must
| work at least 40 hours a week (preferably 80).
|
| Which society would you say is "functioning" better?
|
| Why blame the unemployed for the functioning of a society,
| when record inequality and the policies that allow it are so
| much more responsible?
|
| Look at this graph, and explain to me how unemployment is the
| problem here:
| https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/23410.jpeg
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Doesn't seem like a realistic concern given the current
| state of economies and the need for human labor.
|
| Why are people in society B concerned with the majority
| working if they are unnecessary?
| mandmandam wrote:
| > Why are people in society B concerned with the majority
| working if they are unnecessary?
|
| I think that's a great question to ask. Some possible
| answers:
|
| A - to make money for the yacht class
|
| B - to keep the 99% too busy/distracted to wonder why
| _all_ the productivity gains of the last 50 years have
| gone to the yacht class (see graph above)
|
| C - They're not even that concerned - they pay people to
| be concerned about that stuff on corporate media / in
| politics / in our Supreme Court.
|
| The point above is that "100% employment" is absolutely
| not the barrier between society B and society A. There's
| no good reason for full employment to be "necessary" to a
| well functioning society.
|
| It could even be argued that one measure of a functioning
| society is how many people need to work 60 hours a week
| just to have their basic needs met...
| renewiltord wrote:
| Personally, I prefer society C, where nanobots and
| plentiful fusion power mean that we are a transgalactic
| species at peace and where everyone is happy and joyful.
| Therefore, I shall reject any attempts at change that do
| not immediately transform us into C.
| mandmandam wrote:
| Have you forgotten the context of the conversation?
| (Reminder: "in my mind 'basic' doesn't translate to
| quitting your job and not working")
|
| If you think that full employment is the barrier we're
| facing to society A then you're living in a logical
| wasteland.
| renewiltord wrote:
| In my mind, society C is the basic standard. Anything
| less is living in a late-stage capitalistic dystopia that
| is inherently anti-human. All progress depends on the
| unreasonable man. And I am more unreasonable than
| everyone.
| mandmandam wrote:
| I'll take that as a 'yes' then.
|
| It's not that utopian to want a society where people
| aren't made homeless if they don't work. Finland did it -
| it worked great. It wasn't even that hard.
|
| Also in a society where just _eight people_ own as much
| as _4 billion_. Maybe making 'jokes' denying that we're
| _in_ late stage capitalism is an odd choice? Like, yeah,
| we 're headed for destruction.. It's funny the way Ralph
| Wiggum's "I'm in danger" line is funny.
| dataflow wrote:
| > People have different definitions of UBI, but in my mind
| 'basic' doesn't translate to quitting your job and not
| working.
|
| There's nuance worth teasing apart here.
|
| The only definition I've ever heard is that UBI allows you to
| lose your job and still be able to pay for the basic
| necessities (food, water, shelter, transportation, etc.).
| Anything less misses the whole point.
|
| However, just the basic necessities would make for a pretty
| dull and repetitive life, which most people hate. And so the
| idea (as I understood it) is that it's _not_ supposed to go
| beyond that, so your incentive would still be to keep your
| job if you at all can, not quit it.
| mey wrote:
| Imagine if we gave everyone $20/mo. No strings, tax free, not
| qualifed by income. That obviously isn't enough to live on, let
| alone buy food. But imagine the infrastructure that would be
| universally in place to allow us to scale it up as a society.
| We could find the balance. Maybe it's $1000, maybe it's $5000.
| Maybe another global pandemic happens and we need to dump an
| infusion into people's lives for a time. Just having the system
| would be powerful.
| beejiu wrote:
| Interestingly, the UK is pretty advanced in terms of digital
| benefits infrastructure with its Universal Credit system,
| which works pretty much like a Negative Income Tax.
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| As a society, do we need to worry about where this money will
| come from? Or will there always be an inexhaustible supply
| that also scales up? Or could taking that money away from
| other parts of the economy possibly cause harm, to the point
| where the ubi would become unsustainable?
| ericjmorey wrote:
| Do we as a society know where money comes from now? Could
| the current distribution of money be denying ourselves
| greater value? Is the current system sustainable?
| robotnikman wrote:
| I've always wondered why we don't just nationalize our
| resources and use that income to provide a kind of UBI to
| residents, similar to what Saudi Arabia or even Alaska does
| (for residents who plan to stay long term)
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Because the resource income is trivial in comparison with
| national spending. Most of the resources you might be
| thinking of are already nationalized and rented to industry
| through a competitive bidding process.
| rco8786 wrote:
| I'm reading this as: anything short of providing everyone
| globally with enough money to quit their jobs and rent a nice
| apartment is not UBI.
|
| Which, of course, is never going to happen, nor should it. The
| term "basic" definitely does not automatically entail quitting
| jobs or getting an apartment.
| downboots wrote:
| how much hair is enough to distinguish between a man that is
| bald and one that isn't ?
| abeppu wrote:
| > It's not enough for a real tuition or to support them to
| study instead of work.
|
| ... should it be? Or should you have to save some of your basic
| income for a period to go to school?
|
| If every year you got enough to live off and to be an enrolled
| student, I think the temptation to just be a perpetual student
| might be really attractive to some individuals, and not really
| valuable to society. Even from the yardstick of "how much do
| you learn", I think it's important to follow formal education
| with meaningful periods of trying to usefully apply what you've
| learned to real needs.
| bko wrote:
| Why is the goal to get people to quit their jobs and get a nice
| apartment?
|
| Isn't it supposed to be a minimum base level of support? Why do
| we keep moving the goal posts?
|
| And if everyone quits their job and lives in a nice apartment,
| where is this money going to come from? The problem with
| welfare today is that its a disincentive to work. Start
| working, you lose your transfer payments. A lot of people are
| stuck in this trap and don't want to start working, forsaking
| valuable on the job training and socialization that will hurt
| them in the long run. That's where universal part comes in
| dylan604 wrote:
| > Why is the goal to get people to quit their jobs and get a
| nice apartment?
|
| because that's the way things are in scifi like Star Trek.
| people want to make life imitate art.
| the_other wrote:
| You write like rhat's a bad thing.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I just provided an answer to a question. Your projection
| of good/bad is on you
| jimt1234 wrote:
| Back in my college speech class, a woman gave a presentation
| basically supporting the "welfare today is a disincentive to
| work" myth, with emphasis on "today" (or current), while
| totally destroying the notion that welfare recipients don't
| "want" to work. She was a stay-at-home mom with 2 kids, her
| husband commit suicide after serving in Iraq and then being
| pushed out of the military (this was the 90s when the US
| military was actively drawing down). She basically said that
| the current welfare system (in the 90s, in California) didn't
| allow a way to slowly move off welfare. She said she had many
| offers for part-time work, and work that didn't earn a lot of
| money, but both had potential for her to eventually be
| promoted to full-time or to make more money than welfare paid
| her. But she said there was no way to do this: welfare was
| either all or nothing. But most of all, she dispelled the
| myth that she was some sort of leech that didn't want to
| work. She wanted to work, but the welfare system didn't allow
| it.
|
| Your comment didn't necessarily imply it, but a lot of the
| discourse these days tries to imply (or directly claims) that
| recipients are the problem, they're a bunch of lazy bums that
| don't want to contribute. That's just not true.
| ixwt wrote:
| There was a podcast or video about this exact same issue
| in... Sweden? Some anecdata from people receiving welfare,
| but couldn't start a job or a business because if they
| received any money, they get nothing from welfare and
| wouldn't be able to support themselves.
|
| This resulted in people that were trying to start a
| business _not_ get paid for their work (I believe one of
| the anecdata was a photographer) because doing so would
| mean they couldn 't support themselves.
|
| Personally, I'm a big fan of the "for every $2 you make,
| you get $1 less from UBI/Welfare" concept. This seems a
| very easy way to wean people off of welfare. That money is
| already tracked by the IRS (unless you're getting paid
| under the table).
| Majromax wrote:
| > Personally, I'm a big fan of the "for every $2 you
| make, you get $1 less from UBI/Welfare" concept. This
| seems a very easy way to wean people off of welfare. That
| money is already tracked by the IRS (unless you're
| getting paid under the table).
|
| That's a more gradual phase-out, but it still is an
| effective marginal tax rate of 50%+ - a level that
| wealthy earners would complain about to no end.
|
| In light of this study, it seems to me that a cash-
| support system that wants to encourage work should have a
| starting region with a _negative_ effective phase-out
| rate: "for every $1 you make up to $X, you get $0.25
| _more_ from UBI /Welfare." That would encourage labour-
| market attachment even if tenuous, and it would also have
| a side benefit of making the worker want to report the
| income, possibly uncovering under-the-table payment
| schemes.
| jewayne wrote:
| > _In light of this study, it seems to me that a cash-
| support system that wants to encourage work should have a
| starting region with a negative effective phase-out rate:
| "for every $1 you make up to $X, you get $0.25 more from
| UBI/Welfare." That would encourage labour-market
| attachment even if tenuous, and it would also have a side
| benefit of making the worker want to report the income,
| possibly uncovering under-the-table payment schemes._
|
| Nobody tell this guy about the Earned Income Tax Credit.
| Let him think he discovered it.
| jewayne wrote:
| > _Personally, I 'm a big fan of the "for every $2 you
| make, you get $1 less from UBI/Welfare"_
|
| That's..that's not UBI, at all. UBI is _universal_. If
| there are any means tests _whatsoever_ , that's not UBI.
| briHass wrote:
| UBI would never be truly 'universal'. If someone takes
| money from me and then gives some of it back, I don't
| consider that a free gift.
|
| The only way the numbers would ever balance would be for
| most income earners to end up being taxed >100% of their
| UBI payment.
| karmajunkie wrote:
| or for the ridiculously wealthy to be taxed at a very
| high rate. which is why they reject the notion of UBI so
| fervently.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| >Personally, I'm a big fan of the "for every $2 you make,
| you get $1 less from UBI/Welfare" concept.
|
| This idea is called a negative income tax.
| david38 wrote:
| To me, this is the single biggest problem with welfare.
|
| The woman wants to work, yet cannot because she can't
| guarantee how fast she will move past the "no welfare and
| very little money" transition until she gets promoted to
| full time work.
|
| Her only recourse is to stay on welfare. Now the real issue
| comes to her children. If she managed to really instill in
| them the need to never be on welfare themselves, great,
| they'll join the workforce. But what if she didn't? Maybe
| only tried a bit, but the years of being on welfare made
| her lose touch with the working world. Children now only
| see welfare and thus generational poverty starts.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This isn't a problem really with welfare, but a problem
| with implementing welfare in the dumbest way possible.
|
| In general, no policy, like none at all, should be
| designed to suddenly come into effect when you hit a
| constant. All functions should be smooth.
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| Try that argument on a bean-counter, i.e. like everyone
| holding an elected or decisive office these days. The
| will think you are crazy, from Mars, an interloper,
| freerider, or, worse, a communist. At any rate, they will
| not understanhd you, but, whether they understand you or
| not they will ignore or silence you. THERE MUST BE LIMITS
| AFTER ALL!!1!
| throwway120385 wrote:
| My elected representatives seem to understand this pretty
| well. The problem is that people keep electing other
| people who view anyone not working as leeches. Often the
| difference between keeping those elected officials and
| electing someone that represents you is a few hundred or
| a few thousand people deciding that their vote does
| matter after all and going and casting it. It's about the
| population of a rural village or small town. I don't know
| how we're going to get back to our golden age, but I know
| that we need to find the motivation somehow.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > All functions should be smooth.
|
| I like to believe--or at least fantasize--that bipartisan
| alliances can be built around a shared commitment to Good
| Equations in Public Policy, even if they disagree on what
| those policies are.
|
| "Look Bob, I think your tax cut proposal is pure pork and
| regulatory capture, but that one one goddamn sexy curve."
| jewayne wrote:
| When you really peel back the layers, you'll find that
| voters' instincts are that any means-tested program
| should come with a hefty punishment for using it. While
| they aren't exactly against helping, they definitely
| think the priorities are 1) Spending as little taxpayer
| dollars as possible, 2) Punishing any recipient of help
| enough to be a warning to others, and then, distantly, 3)
| Helping.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's how you breed shadow employment. People on welfare
| who can work often will find jobs that pay some, or all
| of the salary, under the table. The attitude this
| instills in children is that of having to work hard,
| while scheming against the taxman, to improve your life.
| Some people then do that way past the point they need to,
| and end up at risk of being caught for tax evasion.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| I also shudder to think what types of employers would be
| complicit with such a scenario.
| vharuck wrote:
| You're right to fear employers who want to avoid claiming
| employees so that they don't have to comply with, for
| example, safety laws. But shadow work also includes
| situations with "casual" business relationships, like a
| couple who hires a nanny to watch their kids 40 hours a
| week. Both parties may feel that complying with tax and
| labor laws is too much of a burden.
| bko wrote:
| Yes, exactly. If you pay someone not to work, I can't blame
| them for not working. Sure it could be short-sighted, but
| that's not a moral flaw. The system is designed to keep
| people in poverty and dependent on the system. It's really
| tragic
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Incentives can be even worse than that if you punish
| people for working (e.g. take away more benefits than
| their income increases.)
| actionfromafar wrote:
| If your kids have to live on the street if you take that
| part-time job, it's not only short-sighted to stay on
| welfare, it's the rational thing to do even in the long
| term.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Even more rational is finding an unofficial source of
| income, which is what people in this situation often do.
| At scale, this may create a wrong impression that levels
| of welfare are adequate to guarantee the basics.
| xp84 wrote:
| Yes, and worse, the incidents of unreported income like
| that also create a narrative to be spoon-fed to the
| public, that "welfare cheats" are taking advantage of
| everybody's goodwill. I'm sure it actually happens.
| Everything gets abused by some. But people who are doing
| what you describe are usually not doing it out of greed,
| but to work around that broken system.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| This is alternatively referred to as the welfare cliff [1]
|
| Here[2] is an extreme case study from Chicago where you
| would have to jump from an income of 20k/year to 80K/year
| to make up for the loss of benefits.
|
| https://www.budget.senate.gov/newsroom/budget-
| background/the...
|
| edit[2] https://fee.org/wp-
| content/uploads/articles/welfare_cliff.pn...
| ilya_m wrote:
| What is the link to the Chicago study?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| oops, Added
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wish somebody could come up with a framework whereby we
| drop people's incentives, welfare, taxes, etc... into, I
| dunno, a sigmoid or something. This way politicians can do
| what they want to do: talk about, like, simple additions
| and subtractions. But then secretly it goes into a function
| that smooths it out, and makes sure we don't provide big
| stupid cliffs to drop huge life changes into people's laps
| (well my analogy clearly needs work but you get what I
| mean, I hope).
| willcipriano wrote:
| Could have worked under the table. Babysitting would make
| sense in particular if you are available during the day and
| have children of your own that you are already watching.
|
| A lot of poor people are really good at convincing
| themselves they have no choice but to do the thing they
| wanted to do anyway. It wasn't until I broke free of this
| attitude was I able to escape myself.
| jrmg wrote:
| _Could have worked under the table._
|
| This is a ridiculous take! You're arguing (or appear to
| be) that all-or-nothing welfare systems are fine because
| you can always just commit welfare and tax fraud if you
| want more money?!
| OvidNaso wrote:
| Illegaling working as a daycare no less!
| margalabargala wrote:
| If one is giving a presentation to an audience on this
| sort of thing, it makes sense to highlight "these are the
| terrible incentives that are a problem with the system"
| instead of "here are some semi-illegal survival
| strategies that you could attempt if you are trapped in
| this terribly incentivised system".
| genrilz wrote:
| I am certainly glad that you managed to escape. I don't
| think our society's response to the welfare cliff should
| be to tell people to break the law though. Surely we
| should redesign the law to lift everyone up instead
| instead?
| harimau777 wrote:
| I've heard negative income taxes suggested as an
| alternative to our current approach. I'm not an expert on
| them, but it might be worth looking into for people who are
| interested in ideas for improving our system:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
| highcountess wrote:
| Ignoring all the fallacies, you are correct about one
| thing; the recipients are of course not the problem, the
| problem are the proponents of such nonsensical,
| fantastical, infantile, and even outright immoral and
| unethical concepts like UBI or even welfare.
|
| All we have to do to convince you that UBI and and welfare
| is immoral is to simply make you pay for that which you
| support and not force people who do not support it to have
| to pay for the cost against their will and under threat of
| government terror.
|
| Immediately you will be converted from a supporter of
| getting and giving other people's money when you have to
| pay an additional 30% of your income to support others who
| you don't even know.
| milesskorpen wrote:
| In this specific experiment, people earned $0.20 less for
| every $1 they were given mainly due to working fewer hours.
| Those hours were primarily shifted to leisure. (This is not
| a value statement, just what the study found.)
| fdr wrote:
| You are looking for the term "effective marginal tax rate."
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_marginal_tax_rate
|
| To give a sense how much benefits code and tax code have in
| common, see this worksheet for SNAP eligibility, which
| resembles a second tax return:
| https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/recipient/eligibility
|
| The American benefits code is a patchwork of conflicting
| sensibilities of the electorate: the smallest possible tax,
| paternalism and suspicion against the poor, plus a few
| policy analysis trying to obtain the maximum poverty
| reduction within those constraints. The result is a thicket
| of means tested programs with extremely steep phase-outs
| and a lot of paperwork. The all-in EMTR for an American
| with income between 0-40K a year is chaotic beyond reason
| as a result as they roll up the income spectrum.
|
| This person who gave the presentation is indeed in one of
| the worst cases for the code: a single parent with multiple
| children.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Good point about making it unconditional. I meant more like
| for an opportunity to pause work or reduce work to find a
| better job, or study, or start a business. And I should not
| have said nice apartment but rather standard apartment. Many
| lower cost apartments are substandard: pest problems, poor
| heating/AC, no hookups for washer/dryer, crime-ridden area,
| etc.
| tivert wrote:
| > Why is the goal to get people to quit their jobs and get a
| nice apartment?
|
| > Isn't it supposed to be a minimum base level of support?
| Why do we keep moving the goal posts?
|
| Ultimately, the _whole point_ of UBI is to head off political
| objections to automating away most jobs, so the tech barons
| can pursue the technology to do that unimpeded (at least
| until it 's too late). "Minimum base level of support" is
| basically the Terrafoam welfare warehouses from Manna
| (https://marshallbrain.com/manna).
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| Ditto the drab 'Modicum' welfare system of Disch's '334'.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/334_(novel) (set in the
| 2020s, no less)
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| > The problem with welfare today is that its a disincentive
| to work
|
| No. The reason you say that is because you're young and you
| believe what you've heard. You will soon cease to be the
| former and then presumably, likely, stop to do the latter.
| People want to work, they want to be useful. And yes, if I
| support you but threaten to stop supporting you as soon as
| you get to work for money--suddenly working for money looks
| less attractive. Sure, natural. There's nothing wrong with
| that. But if I support you no matter whether you add money to
| that yourself, then that is not detrimental to your
| willingness to work, it just gives you that much more leeway
| to choose a suitable occupation.
| ahahahahah wrote:
| That's a rather smarmy response for someone who clearly
| lacks reading comprehension. I'd recommend:
|
| (1) look up the definition of "disincentive". The parent
| didn't say anything about people not wanting to work or not
| wanting to be useful. And even then, you actually agreed
| about it being the disincentive ("if I support you but
| threaten to stop supporting you as soon as you get to work
| for money--suddenly working for money looks less
| attractive").
|
| (2) understand the meaning of the phrase "The problem with
| X today is Y". It's very clearly not saying that Y is a
| problem with X, in fact, it's implying that there are other
| approaches to X that don't have problem Y.
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| ?so?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i mean this study clearly shows that people work fewer
| hours and increase leisure time when given money.
|
| i don't think that is a bad thing necessarily but i think
| we can be relatively confident of the empirical reality of
| the effect (at least in the short-term) for quantities of
| money like this?
| valicord wrote:
| > if I support you but threaten to stop supporting you as
| soon as you get to work for money--suddenly working for
| money looks less attractive
|
| So you agree that "the problem with welfare today is that
| its a disincentive to work"?
| Supermancho wrote:
| No, that's not "the problem". Framing dissatisfaction
| with existing solutions as if there is a singular problem
| is not constructive.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| But significantly more than $1000 is not financially feasible
| for a balanced UBI program. The average US taxpayer has $40,000
| of income and pays $6000 in taxes. A balanced UBI program would
| increase the average taxpayers taxes by an amount equal to the
| UBI. So the $40,000 of income would increase to $52,000 and
| taxes would increase from $6000 to $18000. It works out to
| about 15% increase in tax levels.
|
| Yes, we'd try and reduce that income tax increase by getting
| money elsewhere, most significantly because UBI should allow us
| to decrease welfare payments significantly. But that would
| still contribute well under half of the $12K.
|
| The numbers work at $1k a month, but they don't work for levels
| significantly higher than that.
|
| And if UBI isn't balanced, then it will affect inflation,
| making it much less impactful.
|
| I believe that $1k/month is a good figure for UBI. It's not
| quite enough to live on, but it can be in a shared-housing
| situation, and it can go a long ways to cover expenses if you
| have to quit your job due to an abusive boss or something.
| nine_k wrote:
| $1000 is enough to not be very afraid to lose a job, or to fall
| seriously ill. It would allow to look for a job for a longer
| time, or to take a lower-paying but nicer job (as in less
| strain, easier commute, better growth prospects, etc). It may
| allow to start saving some money.
|
| It's more of a safety net than a comfortable sofa: maybe it's
| not as nice, but it keeps you from hitting the floor
| nevertheless.
| settsu wrote:
| Certainly not "universal" (targeted to the unhoused) but maybe
| more towards the "basic" issue you pose:
| https://www.denverbasicincomeproject.org/research
| elamje wrote:
| $1,000/mo in a low income area of Dallas is a lot of money.
| Going from a $700/mo to a $1,700/mo apartment in Dallas is
| luxury. Not sure you're seeing this one clearly....
| Gimpei wrote:
| One of the selling points of unconditional cash transfers is
| that they wouldn't be a disincentive to work. That instead they
| would help quality of life. And indeed, in high poverty
| contexts, they don't disincentivize work. But this result
| suggests that in the US at least, they do cause people to work
| less. This is only one study in one context, so I wouldn't
| consider anything "proven." But, it is a big study and a very
| bad sign.
| mdgrech23 wrote:
| shouldn't even have to buy healthcare. What a joke this country
| is.
| brotchie wrote:
| UBI really makes me think of AI-safety-world i-risk. i.e. Ikigai
| risk (feeling like you have a meaningful purpose in life).
| Ikigai, or purpose, is a Japanese concept dating back to the
| Heian period in Japan. The Japanese word "iki" translates to
| life. Additionally, the "gai" portion of the word comes from the
| word "kai" meaning shell.
|
| Beyond basic needs, Homo Sapiens in their current incarnation
| need some kind of meaning or purpose in life. Some folks can find
| this internally, other folks need to operate in an externally
| imposed value-structure to have meaning.
|
| I'm not sure that UBI actually addresses this, and may be counter
| productive.
| skeledrew wrote:
| This would necessarily[0] be a cultural thing, and particularly
| any mention of Japan means an implicit strong work culture
| stemming from their geographic situation[1]. And if it does
| turn out that there are enough people needing some externally
| imposed structure, something can always be simulated for them.
|
| [0] Necessarily because there was a time when this wasn't a
| thing at all, before the birth of wage labor. Everyone had the
| opportunity to contribute as they saw fit.
|
| [1] Japan is very poor in natural resources (oil, ores, etc),
| and so in order to participate in the global economy, the only
| thing they have to rely on is their human labor pool. And so
| they needed a society of extra hard workers to have a
| competitive edge in something.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Is it not obvious that people would have more time to seek a
| meaningful life if they spent less time working?
|
| The trick will be figuring out how to get people to actually do
| that, rather than just using the money to further participate
| in the same carrot/stick game that they're accustomed to.
|
| How to get them to take a risk and start a business doing
| sobering w important, versus just buying the next larger SUV
| because that's supposedly going to make them happy.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Two other studies on slightly different cash transfer programs:
|
| https://www.who.int/tools/elena/review-summaries/cash-transf...
|
| https://epar.evans.uw.edu/blog/long-term-impacts-cash-transf....
| geor9e wrote:
| I am not sure how small studies can account for the inflation
| wide rollout could cause. Consider this hypothetical: If you give
| 1 of 1000 renters $100, 1 landlord will leave the rent alone
| because they don't know. If you give 1000 of 1000 renters $100,
| word will get to 1000 landlords, who will all increase rent $100,
| because the market will bear it. I'm not saying this will happen,
| just that a small study enjoys the benefits of anonymity.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| This is a pretty common and unsupported argument that people
| also use for things like saying minimum wage doesn't make sense
| for the same reason.
| dang wrote:
| Related: https://www.openresearchlab.org/findings
|
| Also https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-basic-income-
| stud... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41037226, but
| we merged the comments hither)
| andy_xor_andrew wrote:
| I'm dumb and have no real education in economics.
|
| But even my dumb self makes the correlation that in 2020/2021, we
| handed out free money to keep people afloat (a very good thing),
| and then immediately following there was a surge in inflation.
|
| So I guess I don't understand, how do you give out free money
| without devaluing the currency? Am I making an incorrect
| correlation between the stimulus checks and the subsequent
| inflation? Again, I don't know anything about this topic and I
| think the stimulus checks were a good idea that kept a lot of
| people afloat, but was that not the cause of the subsequent
| inflation?
| ixwt wrote:
| The difference is that money was created then for that purpose.
| In an ideal universal basic income, the money comes from taxes;
| not just printed on the spot. This to my (probably base and
| naive understanding of economics) would not result inflation,
| because it would be a re-circulation/flow of tax money, rather
| than injecting new money to the economy.
| heylook wrote:
| Ding ding ding. We have a winner. It also really matters
| which people get the money. For example: we printed
| gazillions of dollars after the 2008 financial crisis, but
| "inflation" was super low that whole time. What happened? We
| gave that money to banks and owners of financial assets, so
| the stuff that they buy more than others was what got
| inflated aka houses and startup equity (yes, your startup
| equity!) and the stock market and yachts and stuff. In 2020
| we gave a bunch of money either directly to every individual
| or to their bosses to give to them, so a different set of
| things got inflated. What do wage workers buy more of with
| their money? Groceries et al. Home rental prices are through
| the roof, but home purchase prices are not. My guess is we
| see home price deflation (or at least lower-than-otherwise
| inflation) unless interest rates start getting cut again,
| which they will probably do because the people that get to
| influence and make that decision all benefit financially or
| politically from cutting those rates, but I digress.
|
| So my (old, bachelors) degree in econ gives me a story that
| makes sense, but surely a more recent or grad-level or
| professional economist can probably point out all the ways
| I'm deluded. One of my physics teachers once told me that
| every year they start by telling you that everything you
| learned last year is a gross oversimplification and now
| they're going to teach you the way it "really" works.
| legitster wrote:
| The stimulus checks kicked off inflation. But inflation should
| have been limited to the amount of money injected in the
| economy. We ended up seeing inflation exceeding the amount of
| money injected.
|
| Hidden in Covid was a massive decline in labor force
| productivity and participation - the lion's share coming from
| baby boomers retiring during this time. So it's no longer about
| the amount of money, but the shrinking pile of stuff it is
| chasing after.
| heylook wrote:
| > But inflation should have been limited to the amount of
| money injected in the economy.
|
| I'm curious to hear more about why that would be the case.
| Money swaps hands constantly and we have explicit ways that a
| single dollar can become many multiples of itself (aka you
| get a dollar, you put it in a bank, the bank lends me 90
| cents, I put it in a different bank, they lend you 81 cents,
| one of us gets another loan secured by our assets, etc, etc,
| etc, now how many dollars are there?).
| legitster wrote:
| It's a bit ramshackle, but we have a pretty consistent way
| we measure money supply in the US:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply
|
| What you are describing is referred to as the "velocity of
| money" - how many times the same dollar changes hands,
| which there is a rough approximation baked into the
| monetary supply analysis -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money
| philipov wrote:
| The stimulus checks weren't the only thing we did, however. We
| did a lot of quantitative easing to keep the stock markets from
| crashing, and I would blame that first.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| UBI is another tool for make citizen obedient to state. Once
| implemented, like debts, there will be strong voting mass for
| system that they could benefit from - with price of less
| independency.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Not all UBI schemes are issued by the state. Consider
| CirclesUBI for instance: issued by us for us as an alternative
| to what the state has for us.
| sjm wrote:
| That is ultimately a better outcome than we currently have,
| where the exact same thing happens, except it's only large
| corporations benefitting. Politicians _should_ be buying votes
| from the working class and tangibly improving their lives in
| the process.
| binary132 wrote:
| Other merits or demerits aside, doesn't it seem obvious that if
| the state started distributing $3,600,000,000,000 of cash a year,
| it could possibly, just maybe, move the needle on inflation just
| a tiny wee bit? Has anyone ever addressed that challenge, or is
| it baked into the pie on purpose? If so, is this just a way to
| redistribute the allocation of assets? If so, why not just be
| honest and start the conversation there?
| jimt1234 wrote:
| There's been a narrative in the US over the last 40-or-so years
| that a "job" is the answer to all social problems. At best,
| that's half-true. Money is the real solution to social problems.
| And maybe it was the case 40 or 50 years ago, but having a job
| doesn't provide the same money that it used to, relative to
| required expenses.
|
| My boomer dad got a job right out of high school, with only a
| diploma, and was able to purchase a house and support my then-
| stay-at-home mother within 3 months of starting work. That is
| simply unheard of now. And it's not because people don't have
| jobs.
| steelframe wrote:
| If you were to hand out $1k a month to everyone in my area an
| immediate result would likely be that rents would increase by
| somewhere close to $1k a month.
|
| Everyone needs somewhere to live. Everyone wants to live closer
| to where they work and where there friends and family are.
| Housing is in limited supply. If everyone had more purchasing
| power, then everyone's going to collectively bid up what they're
| willing to pay for housing simply because they can.
| Brechreiz wrote:
| That's a good example for why we can't leave housing in the
| hands of investors.
| heylook wrote:
| At the margins, more people would have more ability to try to
| work around the market power of landlords. More time for
| political advocacy to rollback NIMBYism, or loosen zoning, or
| to build their own home, or to make an additional purchase that
| makes a marginally cheaper rental more acceptable.
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| All the studies on UBI are flawed.
|
| The whole point of UBI is that everyone gets the money.
|
| When you give a select few extra money they can do things that
| they otherwise wouldn't. When you give everyone money the value
| of the money just decreases.
| globular-toast wrote:
| That's obvious. The point is inequality is reduced.
| kkfx wrote:
| Most people fails to understand a thing talking about basic
| income: it's not for those who get the money but for those who
| get them from those who get in the first place.
|
| Yes, poor tend to be unable to retain money, they spend. Spending
| means someone else get money from them. So those with a basic
| income can spend more, making local economy a bit better and
| still making their life a bit better.
|
| Remember a neglect thing: money are unit of measure of various
| substrate, not a value per se. Exchanging money means moving
| something else.
| skeledrew wrote:
| UBI might be an OK stopgap in the beginning when comparatively
| just a few are losing their jobs. Over time though, in the long
| run, the core of currency-based systems will need to be replaced
| as a greater percentage of labor is made valueless by AI, with
| the resulting increase in bodies not earning anything and
| decrease in bodies bearing the tax burden. I hardly see any
| discussion anywhere of what happens when 100% of useful labor is
| automated to the point that humans have 0 comparative advantage
| compared to AI+robots in anything of economic value.
| stephenflanders wrote:
| As long as energy isn't unlimited, humans will always have some
| comparative language compared to AI + robots. Favorite metaphor
| for this is a lawyer and a secretary. The lawyer is better at
| everything than the secretary, but there's still a role for the
| secretary because the lawyer's time is better spent actually
| doing the law. It'll be the same for humans and AI.
| skeledrew wrote:
| The sun's energy is "unlimited"; it'll be around for far
| longer than we will be.
| tivert wrote:
| > As long as energy isn't unlimited, humans will always have
| some comparative <s>language</s> [advantage] compared to AI +
| robots.
|
| The truth of that really depends what you mean by "humans"...
|
| All humans? Probably not, as there are _a lot_ of people who
| aren 't especially capable or talented, and every conceivable
| economic activity they could do can be done by a machine with
| an AI with a below-average human intelligence and a capable
| robot body.
|
| Also, IIRC, solar panels are already more efficient than
| plants, so I doubt there's a dystopian "humans are better for
| manual labor" loophole.
|
| Most humans? Still probably no, given that AI seems to be
| making the most progress against white collar work right now.
|
| Some minority of humans? This might be true, as there are
| people who are extraordinarily smart and talented. It seems
| most likely that AI will be unable to replace the people at
| the very tops of their fields, but there are very, very few
| people in those positions, and most people just plain don't
| have the ability work at that level.
| tivert wrote:
| > I hardly see any discussion anywhere of what happens when
| 100% of useful labor is automated to the point that humans have
| 0 comparative advantage compared to AI+robots in anything of
| economic value.
|
| Eventually automated gas chambers, or just letting poverty take
| care of the problem my itself.
| TheChaplain wrote:
| I don't see how UBI can work, on a nationwide scale it means
| everyone got x% more money and the market would adjust itself
| accordingly by raising prices?
|
| Also UBI is funded by taxes, which if applied to middle class
| they will vote against you. And if applied to companies, they
| push it down on the customer, making everything cost more (and
| therefore negating the UBI effect).
|
| What probably would be more effective for society would be
| improved an ACA, a cap on healthcare costs for all if you will
| and free yearly health checkups.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Also UBI is funded by taxes
|
| Some of those taxes are already being paid. We have a lot of
| social programs that, for what could politely be called
| "political reasons", include _extensive_ administration whose
| primary function is gatekeeping and means testing. Often, the
| administration of those programs costs _substantially more_
| than any money "saved", leaving aside that it also has a very
| high false positive rate, excluding people who actually should
| have received it. But there is a political faction that would
| rather see government burn a billion dollars just to make sure
| a tiny fraction of that isn't paid to someone who didn't
| "deserve" it. To quote
| https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
| , "the policy choices available to them impact the user
| experience of fraudsters and legitimate users alike. They want
| to choose policies which balance the tradeoff of lowering fraud
| against the ease for legitimate users to transact."
|
| Eliminating entire _programs_ and the _massive administrative
| overhead_ of those programs, and replacing them with something
| that merits the label "universal", is much more efficient.
|
| Also:
|
| > on a nationwide scale it means everyone got x% more money and
| the market would adjust itself accordingly by raising prices?
|
| This is assuming the injected money has zero multiplicative
| effect on the economy, which is very unlikely to be the case.
| By way of example, since we're on a site created by a startup
| accelerator: Many, many people have said that UBI would be a
| _massive_ boon to the startup ecosystem, by making it possible
| for many more people to safely try to build a startup without
| as much personal risk.
|
| Analyses vary, but some analyses have suggested that UBI may be
| a net _benefit_ to the economy. At the very least, economic
| boosts provided by UBI substantially offset its cost. That 's
| in addition to the offset mentioned above of replacing existing
| less-efficient programs with UBI.
|
| > improved an ACA, a cap on healthcare costs for all if you
| will and free yearly health checkups.
|
| We should do this as well, because healthcare is one of the few
| things that _isn 't_ addressed by UBI (since ultimately it's an
| insurance mechanism).
| highcountess wrote:
| Is there anyone else in here that sees UBI is the "left's"
| equivalent to flat-earth or chemtrails? No matter how much you
| explain the most basic and fundamental realities that are
| adjacent to the laws of physics, they simply cannot or appear to
| be psychologically incapable of accepting the reality of the
| matter and are baffled.
|
| It's like those flat-earth people who did that experiment with
| the extremely sensitive gyroscope that proved that the earth was
| rotating and spherical; and were caught on recording saying
| "well, we clearly cannot accept that" and I think eventually
| simply deliberately ignored and suppressed it from their minds.
|
| Do not ever underestimate certain human's capacity for self-
| delusion.
|
| The bigger problem though is that this UBI cult is very
| authoritarian and tyrannical at its core, consistently increasing
| the insistence that they must take and use ever increasing
| amounts of other people's money to prove that UBI works,
| coincidentally making the researchers and the common NGO types
| scam artist operatives huge amounts of money in the process.
|
| UBI is simply a con job, a fraud, a lie, theft, and even slavery
| ... theft of resources and services against their will and under
| threat of violence and harm in order to support the lives and
| livelihoods of others.
|
| You want UBI? Great, sign up to have your income taxed to pay for
| it.
| bankcust08385 wrote:
| UBI at this time is like topical ointment on a festering wound.
| Americans first need livable wages and single-payer healthcare
| that isn't Medicare, which is a Byzantine, confusing maze of
| dozens of coverage options largely outsourced to for-profit
| corporations.
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