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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

"The total amount of work hours decreased by only 13%."

https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money...

Either way, whether it's 13% or 5%, it makes us all poorer.

The Namibia experiment is not remotely comparable. That was a) a transfer of wealth from outside the community into it (closer to imperialism than redistribution), b) poverty in Namibia is not remotely like poverty in the US, and c) a big chunk of the BI in Namibia was directed into investment.

The closest analogue of (c) in the US would be funneling money to rich people (who invest) rather than poor people (who consume).

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It only makes us poorer if the 13% work hour reduction is going to something less efficient than work, with regard to overall economic effectiveness.

With mincome didn't they determine that the work hours decreased was dominated by 1) young males entering the work force later due to increased high school completion rate and 2) females talking longer maternity leave?

If thats the case, then its possible that it made everyone richer if over the lifetime more educated workers and more cared for infants are more efficient.

*Note: I actually am a huge skeptic of basic income schemes as the math seems dramatic, but I think a simple "people work less hours" counterargument is overly simplistic.

One can always postulate hard to measure second order effects, such as the ones the Mincome study claims (note that it doesn't actually quantify them, but merely hints as to their direction).

However, it's a bit strange to expect that all the second order effects will happen to point in the direction of our preferred policy. The only quantified effect here - labor force disincentive - has been measured and agrees 100% with economic theory. It also agrees with other related (but not identical) results, namely that welfare/unemployment also has a huge labor force disincentive.

Why are we appealing to unquantified second order effects when the first order effects are measured and shown to be large, shown to be in 100% agreement with basic economic theory, and viewed by many proponents of BI as a desired feature [1]?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11619712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11619690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11619691

Reducing the hours worked in the US by 13% would make us comparable to other civilized countries.

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