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Comment by ttoinou | Hacker News Reader

This article is really bad. M. Friedman has nothing to do with UBI. What is the origin of the money given ? No one seem to talk about it.

From the paper "Assuming that leisure is a normal good, economic theory predicts that an increase in unearned income reduces labor supply [...] In this paper we study a large cash transfer program in a developing setting, one that has come under criticism for its potential negative labor supply effect" Why would reducing the labor supply be a bad thing ? If we can live the same lives and work less, that's definitely a good thing.

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I agree. Milton Friedman says; "Instead of giving non-cash benefits like food stamps, housing vouchers and education we should calculate how much those benefits cost per person distribute that to people as negative income tax." Government spends tons of resources running these programs and leads to corruption and unfair distribution for a lucky few, "bucket is leaking". Every single UBI proposal/experiment I have seen keeps all the benefits and then adds an extra basic income payment, which works fine in a small experiment but quickly becomes unaffordable if you scale it to the whole country.

Friedman advocated a form of UBI called negative income tax. Today we know it applied as policy in the form of the EITC.

Didn't know the US EITC, thanks for the info. Read the wikipedia entry, it seems aweful.

I actually like M.F. negative income tax as a theorical idea, but don't think it'll ever be applied the way he formulated it.

The EITC is not a negative income tax or UBI, it's a ramp-up/ramp-up means-tested and behavior-tested welfare program.

It may have been inspired by the NIT, but the essence of the inspiration was lost entirely in conventional welfare-program thinking.

Yes, you're right. To be clear, Friedman's NIT was merely a spiritual successor to the UBI, and the EITC is of course what happens when ideas traverse through the bastardization of academia to actual policy making.

Who is to say what an actual UBI would look like after undergoing a similar process.

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