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Comment by matte_black | Hacker News Reader

I would say that while plenty of people in the first generation to receive UBI may continue to work, later generations that are simply born with it have a much higher risk of simply moping around doing nothing of value. Any experiment that doesn’t explore UBI beyond a single generation isn’t rigorous enough IMO.

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That's what I am thinking too. It will be interesting to see how people who have only seen UBI their whole life will behave. In a summer job as a teen I worked at a government welfare agency. Some of the clients were third generation welfare recipients and you could definitely see that they had no idea how a job works because they had never seen anybody who held a job for a long time. They would just skip work for a week without telling anybody or be insulted when the boss told them what to do.

A UBI experiment will probably need 50 years or more to determine what the long term consequences will be.

How is it possible to be a third generation welfare recipient? Doesn't unemployment run out after 2-3 years?

That was in Germany. They won't let you starve so if you absolutely can't or don't want to work there is a level of assistance to keep you from starving. I think it's the same in the US. You will always get some level of welfare to not starve.

It's dated but if anything it's gotten worse.

https://scholars.org/brief/what-happens-poor-families-when-t...

We will also need to see how the job market reacts. If people don't feel like they need to work, employers will have a harder time finding good employees and making them stay. So they might start offering much higher wages and fancy benefits, which in turn will make more people want to work so they can enjoy those perks. Positions that still can't be filled will be automated away. Sooner or later the market will reach a new equilibrium.

I'd call it a success if about half the adults end up working and the other half stay at home, just like people used to do 100 years ago... except this time, both men and women should be free to choose which side they want to be on.

>>simply moping around doing nothing of value

while this may be true, I think it's somewhat of a false dichotomy. If we get to the point where UBI is implemented, I don't think the only two choices will be 'continue working or mope around'.

There are hundreds of thousands of ways to create value in society, and they don't have to be tied to the notion of working in exchange for money for survival.

I think the fear is that a small portion of society will be doing all the work to support the 'lazy ones'. It's understandable, but I think it is entirely possible to avoid that situation. Of course, it would require a fundamental shift in our worldly view (i.e. from individual success to shared success), but those discussions are hard and usually get shut down as 'commie crap'.

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