Hacker News Reader

So it looks like what you argue is that without UBI some people are forced to work the shitty low paying jobs that more secure people would pass on, and that's beneficial to society? So basically wage slavery of the lower income people is beneficial to society?

I dunno... I think, UBI may actuall ydrive change in those very awful professions where they become more attractive either through quality of life improvements or through the pay rise. Otherwise, yep, I think having people not to go to a soul crushing job because they are secure is a better thing than grinding lots of them down generation over generation.

Nope. I’m saying UBI, economically cannot lift these people out of the jobs because someone needs to be at the bottom.

If you want to help people, improve minimum wage

While it is certainly possible to give people enough money to become uninterested of working, one of the conclusions of the experiment is that the UBI version tested did not make people less efficient at seeking employment. UBI just made them happier.

In other words, not implementing their UBI version is simply a way to punish unemployed people for not having a job. You can still argue that unemployed people should be unhappy, but you no longer have any basis for saying that unhappines will make them more likely to get a job.

> UBI... did not make people less efficient at seeking employment.

No, it didn't make them significantly lazier short term.

They didn’t get UBI forever, they got it for a fixed amount of time. If they quit working, they would be shit out of luck when they money stopped flowing. It’s not a very useful experiment.

Really this is just basic economics though. Money has decreasing marginal utility. The first stack of cash you get pays rent, then food, then later on luxuries. For low income workers, the opportunity cost of not working is not being able to afford basic things. If that’s covered, there’s no reason to do a crappy job for low pay. You don’t even need to assume laziness. If cashiers now have their basic needs covered and want to go invest their time into improving their education, then the cost of cashiers goes up. If the cost of cashiers goes up, the cost of food goes up. If the cost of food goes up, the original UBI is now too low, so the cashiers need to stop pursuing education and get some money again. If an equilibrium exists, it’s going to be at the point where poor people need to work, because somebody needs to clean the toilets.

The security that you have medical care, food and housing tomorrow takes away a lot of psychological pressure and your mind can think about other things. But nevertheless I also think about the ethical implications of letting people die because they cannot afford the medical care they need. A society that just thinks only about profitability of a person is in itself unjust and inhumane.

If you look at communities where large portions of the population have their basic medical care, food, and housing all provided or paid for by the government, you don't see hotbeds of creative and entrepreneurial activity. You see cesspools of drugs and crime.

Like Switzerland and Sweden? What are you talking about?

Putting them both in the same sentence so nobody will spot you keep getting them mixed up? Smart move ;)

And I agree that these are things that need to be solved. But UBI won’t do that long term.

Like, just to push a point, with medical care, the prices are so absurdly high that a poor person with UBI who had to pay a large medical bill would effectively just lose their UBI to medical debt payments and interest. And now they’re back where they began. It’s an entirely different problem.

Under UBI, the people with low skills would have the means to upgrade those skills.

Exactly. And if all the people with low skills upgrade their skills, the cost of low skilled labor increases, driving up the price of goods, and making the current UBI insufficient.

We NEED low skilled labor. Bioshock proved this years ago.

==We NEED low skilled labor. Bioshock proved this years ago. ==

Would we stop importing this labor from other (poorer) countries? I imagine only people with a SSN would get the UBI benefits. Immigrants would still come here to do low-skilled jobs as they would be ineligible for UBI, no?

A very large proportion of low skill labor is done by us citizens- and we don’t have many visas for low skilled labor.

This wouldn’t evade the problem of increasing the cost of low skill labor and thus increasing the cost of goods.

To your point, it would force the poor without UBI into even harder poverty.