People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report

Maybe if overtime was flexible, you could suggest hiring unskilled workers to do those tasks at home.

I love my kid, but it's not like he's learning cutting edge stuff that requires an engineer to teach them. And there's many hours in the evenings and weekends we spend together where he learns how his dad behaves.

And really this only applies to 0-5. After that, kids go to school.

Look at Sweden.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/09/sweden-...

With all due respect, but this opinion reeks of someone who actually has the ability to choose his own job, say no to exploitative employment-practices, all while actually getting payed decently.

Someone who has to work a shit job they hate for a salary that barely pays the bills because they simply have no other option might as well be miserable because of this situation. This endless slog they cannot escape, a treadmill they despise but have no other choice than to keep going.

And let's not kid ourselves - there are _a lot_ of people out there who are doing jobs they don't want to do, or at least wouldn't want to do for the kind of salary they receive.

I know a senior lady, for example, that works fixing clothes. She doesn't need it to "survive", and sometimes work piles on and becomes another worry on top of other things she needs to think about. But she does it, in part as alternative income but also to keep herself entertained and as a way to relate to her community. She is the person you go to if you need mending, and that's a social relationship. People from the neighborhood will look need her and seek her for this. Receiving or delivering work is also an excuse to interact with people.

Would she go to a factory and fix stranger's clothes even if it were for the same amount of time and money? Probably not. She doesn't need it to survive, she needs it to relate.

So in that sense I do worry that UBI could disincentivize forming these work and exchange relationships or finding your place in a community/society. Just like kids given the choice might pick not to go to school, but eventually this would probably lead them to isolation and not growing in other ways, I wonder if a percentage of adults that haven't realized work can be better than no work could isolate themselves from social and mental growth in the same way.

In general thus I think UBI might work better as a compliment to reformed labour laws. Say, a 4 hour week. Or unionization, to push back on crappy management and predatory workplace policies. A goal should be to have as much people working as possible, but not because they are forced to in order to survive, but because they want to.

Why do you think this is not a meaningful contribution to society? In order for sitting-in-the-room people to debate on the forums, someone else – a part of society! – has to spend their time on said forums, creating demand for discussion. Otherwise the forums would have no posts at all. One person sitting in the room could effectively “free up” time of dozens others that they could spend otherwise.

It is already like this in many countries.

In Italy it has always been like that at least since the end of WW2.

It has produced one of the largest youth unemployment rate in the west.

Unemployed parents that never worked, grew up disadvantaged kids with no other alternative than become NEETs

In my opinion balancing it out without creating first as many jobs as possible is a really hard task, doomed to fail given the current state of the world politics

The ones I knew working minimum wage lived cheaply. They didn't worry about losing their jobs because they were hard workers who could be counted on - the type of person who gets the maximum raise until they top out the pay scale. They were also the type of person to be offered job in management and have the potential to make as much as anyone with an engineering degree (we haven't kept in touch - typically the requirement to move for the job every few years catches up and they decide the next promotion isn't worth it and so stagnate at nice wage that is better than average)

I knew people who sit around drinking bear and working part time. Everybody knew they were losers. It wasn't lack of opportunity that is keeping them down it is lack of following up on it. They would abandon their kids even if you paid the a million dollars a year (even assuming they don't overdose on some drug)

I also know mentally ill people. Their abilities vary, but UBI won't help them as they will just waste it on some other scam. (I know someone who lost money to the Nigerian prince scam, and a dozen others - the family is careful to lock down his money now so he can't do that)

> Investment distributes wealth primarily from the elite to the slightly-less elite.

If you've seen how China changed in the last couple decades, you'd see how this obviously isn't true. Basically all electronics are manufactured in a developing Asian country by the children of subsidence farmers.

1. Apple spends $10 million dollars to build a factory in a developing country. This creates 2,000 jobs over a couple years. These people can finally afford to see a doctor and heat up their homes during the winter.

2. Apple gets taxed $10 million that funds 1000 people's UBI. Their lives are somewhat less stressful. There is a higher demand for Iphones, so Apple can charge a bit more money for them. After a decade, they are able to open an additional factory. However, within that decade, 100 people in that developing country died of a disease that would be easily cured with medicine had they had they been able to work at the factory 10 years ago.

43% of children born into the bottom quintile (bottom 20%) remain in that bottom quintile as adults.

Is that anything but conjecture? I see a study showing that UBI is a "good thing", and you didn't provide a source for your reasoning.

Edit: to all those saying that the parent comment is straightforward, or common sense, or whatever, it's not straightforward or common sense because I disagree that UBI would be a failure. No one knows what would happen under UBI, but these types of studies give some evidence as to what is going to happen.

Everyone saying the parent is correct is basically similar to saying we should stop studying fusion because it's common sense we'll never achieve it (there are people who say that, too).

It's a good first step to study this, at least, and goes to show we need to test UBI on a greater scale.

All human behaviors are affected by knowing that something is going to end soon or not.

Yet, UBI is often held under strict scrutiny. While the status quo is not challenged in the same way.

I understand it's much more stressful than permanent guaranteed UBI, but it's truer to the real intent of UBI (which I believe is reducing the friction when deciding to try new job or state or whatever in a pursuit of self-actualization).

Part of the problem is that some welfare is not about the money, but the support. UBI is less likely to help someone with mental issues than someone who hates working at 7/11 while studying. Generalised, UBI likely helps those who have an impermanent problem over those that have longer term issues.

Society likely would still need welfare services for those people who struggle with the multiple travails of existence.

Personally, I'm less interested in UBI in the first world, where welfare is pretty good already and the negative affects are unknown and complicated. I'm more interested in what affect it would have on the third world, where the downsides - disincentives to work etc - seem far less of an issue. https://www.givedirectly.org/ubi-study/ is a good example.

Where do you think all this Income is going to come from? The middle class will shoulder the bulk of it which will widen the wealth gap. You will end up with 1k in UBI and 1500 in taxes to pay for it.

And here, in one sentence, is why we will NEVER see UBI in the United States of America. There is no ability to be the moral whip and maintain control over someone else's choices to make sure they don't 'waste my money'. Therefore, it will never happen.

In the US, at least, it's not about doing what's right. It's not about making sure people are healthier, less stressed, and happier. It's about making sure they live the 'best' life they can, as defined by groups like the "moral majority".

The only thing that betters society is the positive application of knowledge to creating something of value for others. It's not enough to learn a topic, you must actually apply it make a difference.

The average person who is capable of getting a Bachelor’s degree but doesn’t is very distant from the average high school graduate. And if you drop out of college after two years because you can’t cut it your labour market outcome is only very slightly better than a high school grad but your debt load of half of a college grad.

Parent said

> First: All studies so far show a pretty consistent ~10% work disincentive. This is what all the detractors say when they say it disincentivizes work. So how about this one? From actually reading the study's conclusion:

>> Slightly less than one-fifth were employed before but unemployed during the pilot (17%)

> So even worse than what we've seen so far. 17% dropping out of the labor market when its a short-term study is huge.

Child comment proved this to be misleading. I myself was misled. Anyone reading this would think that this study showed that UBI disincentivizes work. Child comment showed that this conclusion does not follow from the study.

You can speculate all you want on what permanent UBI would do but what the parent comment said is absolutely a misrepresentation of the study.

Because UBI is a misguided effort. It aims to fix inequality in any given country without addressing the root cause for increased domestic inequality: that low-skilled workers in developed nations are more expensive than low-skilled workers in developing nations in an age of cheap global logistics and telecommunications.

More sustainable solutions would arguably revolve around improving the educational system and revisiting {fiscal, educational, cultural, ...} incentives broadly across society to get the population trained to a a higher average skill level so that they may compete (and hopefully outcompete) for jobs currently performed by equivalent workers abroad.

Such an effort would presumably lead, in the long term, to a higher skilled global population who is equipped to bring about visions of the future. UBI, meanwhile, is tantamount to subsidizing low-skilled workers so they may continue to create little value (in terms of technological advancement and economic progress) and perpetuate the societal imbalances that preclude them from realizing their true potential.

It seems like an easy choice to make, at least if you buy into the assumption that we indeed want to maximize technological advancement and economic progress, and that those are bona fide proxies for improving standards of living and diminishing poverty.

How would he be more successful by not working at all?

> He would likely overall save the corporations he's being employed on and off by money by reducing their turnover.

Businesses are used to high turnover with lower paid employees. It's ok, though, because their jobs tend to be interchangeable and easy for someone new to get up to speed on.

> win-win

The lose part is supporting people who would otherwise work and contribute to the economy. I don't know many people, but the fact that I personally know several that would not work if they didn't have to means that there are likely plenty of them. (I'm talking about able-bodied adults without dependents.)

For children with autism it is the norm.

Sorry, but what they did to my children was shameful.

Please don't presume to put words in my mouth again.

And the reaction to it from people is quite... shortsighted? From my perspective. Often the exact people who would benefit from a better housing market vote for parties who are more restrictive in terms of new buildings. There's this perception that new buildings are only being built for "rich" people, which is true, but it also means the rich people aren't competing for your shitty apartment anymore. But somehow, people don't really think about that.

A land value tax is levied on the value of the unimproved land in a specific plot. Whether you leave the land fallow or build 30 storeys of luxury condominiums on it, the amount of dollars you have to pay in taxes doesn't change.

So the (additional) housing supply is completely untaxed.

What is taxed however is the following:

If the town gets a new highway or airport, and that raises land prices, that gets taxed. Same for a UBI.

(To pre-empt the next discussion: it's not completely trivial to separate the value of the building from the value of the land. But it can be done. Insurance companies do it routinely. And there are a variety of strategies to make the assessment that are hard to game or cheat.)

Of course it can. Why, in the US, almost a million of disabled people stopped being disabled and entered employment in recent few years, because of good economy:

https://twitter.com/ernietedeschi/status/1230489362883678210

The truth is that millions of people on disability in the US aren't actually so disabled that they cannot work: as the above shows, they will work if they consider the employment conditions good enough. Yes, there are plenty of disabled people who really cannot work, but majority of disability in the US is created, not alleviated by Social Security. One needs to remember that by creating programs to help poor and disabled, along with helping poor and disabled, one also creates more poor and disabled.

But in a global economy that's irrelevant: the greater availability of jet engines where they are used will cascade eventually into a greater availability of bowling balls in the town where they make jet engines.

It doesn't cancel out because the people receiving the UBI tend to buy different goods than the people paying the tax. Fewer people bidding up prices on yachts and capital, more people bidding up basic goods and services.

Imagine if you were to come up with a policy where you increase senior pension rates by $3000/mo but you get rid of Medicare - do you think Bernie Sanders would go for that deal? I'll tell you right now: ZERO chance he would support it. And that doesn't even take into account that there are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of jobs that support the current entitlement programs. Do you think those employees will just let you lay them off without a fight?

I don't have any links, but I have gone out of my way to find out what different groups think of UBI when I was excited about UBI a few years ago. My excitement has since deflated and I now think UBI isn't a solution to any actual issues with automation. Specially it doesn't solve the following:

- It doesn't get rid of existing entitlement programs.

- It doesn't solve automation issues for the developing world which can't afford to pay its citizens and will be hit especially hit hard by automation.

- It doesn't solve automation issues for the developed world since people derive meaning and self-worth from work (there's a difference between working and supporting yourself and being supported by government handouts). To reinforce this point: communities that are supported by government welfare programs tend to have issues with drug and alcohol abuse and crime. Furthermore, the social welfare programs in the developed world are already extensive enough that healthcare, food, and shelter will always be available regardless of the state of automation.

> I empirically analyze the causal impact of the minimum wage increase on housing rents in the United States and Japan. In both countries, minimum wages hikes increase housing rents in urban areas: 10% minimum wage increase induces 1%-2% increase in the United States and 2.5%-5% increase in Japan.

Now imagine a 10% raise for every earner.

I think it's more likely we'll see UBI proponents want to factor in a cost of living adjustment based on the place one lives, which will be a nightmare of political administration and unintended consequences.

There has to be a baseline standard, amounting to triage, above which "your core needs are met, and you have a path to thrive on - up to you to do you now."

Maybe there's another moving standard of minimum standard of living, whereby people don't existentially need X but society at large agrees everyone should have X (or opportunity thereto).

If you're poor in America you live with constant fear of minor financial catastrophes because they will further constrain your opportunity, perpetuating a downwards spiral. Integrated over time this background anxiety drastically reduces one's subjective quality of life, and also leads to physical health issues down the road.

By contrast, if you're a monarch of a medieval European kingdom, you might be dying of syphilis at 43 but with the knowledge that everything possible is being done to save you, and you can call for a roast pheasant or the execution of your meddling cousin on your deathbed.

It's completely subjective, and thus very easy to dismiss, but it contributes the "missing term" for me in thinking about this question.

Someone who couldn't afford broadband before UBI wouldn't be able to afford broadband after (beyond a brief blip where the market sorts pricing out) because rent & broadband just increased price according to everyone now having UBI. If anything, more won't afford essentials and near-essentials precisely because overall prices will rise.

It's the same reason why minimum wage really doesn't work: prices increased to match a baseline income for low productivity, coupled with an increased population unable to earn at all because they simply don't produce $minwage value (and are now marked "poor" and routed to get their needs provided by a bureaucracy).

The aforementioned Greeks & Romans had to go hunt & kill & skin & dry a good-sized animal to make a shirt.

You can buy an entirely respectable modern shirt for $5 today, 42 minutes of mundane commodity labor in a comfortable environment.

For instance basic income may mean salaries go up for the jobs nobody wants to do as people are given an alternative, while salaries go down for jobs that are intrinsically motivating.

I can't say for certainty though. My best guess is that it's going to be better than the hodgepodge of social welfare (and its complex effects) we have today.

Also, how is learning how to fence a good skill to avoid destitution? The rich had leisure time and invested that time in cultural skills, this isn't actually a bad thing either - it's my hope that everyone can afford to develop a hobby and be creative in their life... but that has nothing to do with avoiding destitution.

Rich people literally just need to not be complete idiots - if you've got 300 million in the bank put it in some low interest stable investment and you'd be able to live off the investment earnings alone. There, I just explained all the life skills you need as a rich person - there is no equivalence between the road the rich and the poor need to walk to survive.

"Pay more" is meaningless when most of what you want is provided for you. What are you going to use that money for?

For some godawful reason people think near to full automation is going to look exactly like today, but without driving or something.

It's not. It's going to look radically different. It will be unprecedented. It's very naive to believe the current methods of incentives will work for a society that doesn't need them.

The truth is, a lot of business ventures simply aren't profitable. It isn't profitable for me to start a business where I deliver whitecastle to remote areas by flying couriers there with the food - but it could be profitable if enough market changes occurred.

As these bloat businesses die off we'll see a shift in the market - either there will be a surplus of employees (that will drive down the cost of employment and enable more bloat businesses) or those employees will find other businesses to work at that can survive in the margins that exist.

As far as I can tell, none of these lesser programmes has had any effect above and beyond inflation on cost of living. Wasn't the sky supposed to fall when Washington State passed that ballot measure for a graduated minimum wage increase back in 2016?

Meanwhile, there are plenty of examples of awfully expensive large scale "back to square one" experiments that have been undertaken by other political ideologies with little to no opposition—where is the economic growth that was supposed to have happened as a consequence of the Ryan/Trump tax cuts in 2017?

The question is always: who is benefiting from this?

If people had more "disincentive to work" then getting people to work would require paying them more money. Jobs that self-cancel their own profession could then hire fewer people industry-wide and result in a net productivity boost, since whatever they do in the alternative can't be more useless than what they were doing.

In the case of horse shit, for sure it is better if someone cleans it, but that someone can also be the person that trains or rides the horse.

There isn't an intrinsic need for a job that performs only that task.

Under this definition, a lot of dirty or otherwise maligned jobs are still essential to society (including stall cleaning, depending on your perspective of how essential having horses is) and are thus not bullshit jobs, but a lot of others (rubber stampers, make workers, flunkies) are bullshit jobs.

The reimbursement of janitors might go up with UBI, that's fine, if it's going up then it means that something in the current market situation was artificially holding back their reimbursement. The market can correct pretty easily for UBI and make sure that the jobs that need to be done are indeed done (or else they aren't jobs that need to be done) and maybe janitor, as a profession, is scaled back to just waxing the floors and we discover that people working in an office should, once a week, empty their own trash cans - it's a very plausible outcome from UBI and one that will happen naturally if it'll happen at all.

Everyone gets the UBI, not just people who don't work. If hypothetically fewer people were to work, more people wouldn't start receiving it because everybody gets it either way.

> Less time worked correlates with less things made.

In general this goes the other way. The history of progress is to make more stuff in less time. If people had more "disincentive to work" then companies would have to pay them more -- which increases the incentive for automation, which creates more stuff with less people working, which solves the problem.

This is also why your "disincentive to work" calculations are off. If you pay <1% of people a UBI, it's not going to affect wages. If you pay it to everyone and there is a "disincentive to work" then to get people to work, companies will have to pay more. Which creates a countervailing incentive to work that keeps people working. It also increases wages (and correspondingly spending), which increases the tax base, so there goes that too.

> So your UBI pays people a fixed percent of the tax base, not a dollar amount? So during a recession, those UBI people will get really screwed....

Taxes are (approximately) a percent of GDP, not a percent of the stock market. Have a look at the GDP graph:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP

Difference from the height of the housing boom to the bottom of the crash was ~3%. Not a huge difference. And it was back to where it was at the height after one year. (Compare to ~50% drop for the Dow. The stock market is not the economy.)

OP just explained why people (or rather, the upper middle class tech workers) of these two cities for out produce potentially thousands of people. A team of software engineers who can nail software for flipped classrooms will replace thousands of teachers AND improve educational outcomes

Work ethic might be engrained into our culture, but someone who is brought up in a society where UBI is normal and they are just a few years away from becoming "rich", I think not-working-ever is a very enticing idea and many teens will fall into that trap.

It's why this article is from the CBC, since Canada (while not perfect) is much better than the US in pursuing good things even if it hurts the powerful.

Some people have more money than they need, it can be removed from them - the intricacies of how they got that money should be very carefully considered when it comes to structuring how UBI would be funded - but they clearly have more money in absolute terms. And that wealth is transferable.

Also, in the western world, we have enough of everything. No one starves in America because there isn't enough corn, they starve because they don't have enough money to afford it - no one is homeless because no homes could be built, they're homeless because nobody wants to pay for the home to be built.

These are all solvable problems.

While I don't want to dismiss your extra effort as improving your results, I suspect that the value placed on your behavior by management may have been out of proportion with objective truth.

I'm also concerned with whether you were Defecting, in a Prisoner's Dilemma sense. Management always sets unreasonable deadlines as long as anybody agrees with them. Only when people are unanimous that this is crazy do they ever seem to back off.

Who has more responsibility for cooking your burger correctly, the cook or the manager? Who has more responsibility for measuring before cutting, the carpenter or the architect? Who has more responsibility for not leaving PII all over service logs, you or your team leader? I would politely suggest that there are different responsibilities for managers, but not that this somehow removes responsibilities from laborers.

> It's unfair to say managers work less because they do management tasks rather than the work their subordinates do. In virtually every job I've had, the more senior the manager, the more hours they worked. Retail especially.

My former CEOs have had enough spare time to show up in the tabloids because they can't stop having sex with their employees or making questionable business decisions with authoritarian governments. I don't have time for sex with my coworkers. Perhaps team leaders or low-level managers have to put in hours, but administrative management definitely does not.

> They don't just claim their positions optimize labour, it actually does optimize it.

In my lifetime, Linux was born and became not just a serious competitor to proprietary kernels, but supplanted them. Thus, the FLOSS model of a massive global commune of public-domain information and tools is a viable contender, able to compete with any corporation.

When I contributed to Linux, I reported to one of the subsystem lieutenants, and my code was reviewed by them and other contributors to the subsystem. For no money whatsoever, they advised me on which parts of the subsystem were worth contributing to, which outstanding tasks were too hard to tackle, and which documentation to read.

Also in my lifetime, Wikipedia was born, supplanting many proprietary encyclopedias within only a few years, and today it is another shining example of the triumph of the FLOSS model.

When I contributed to Wikipedia, I just did whatever I wanted. Whenever something looked like it could be improved, and I had the time and energy to improve it, I did what had to be done to make things better. If people disagreed, they could undo what I did; if I disagreed with them, then there were community arbiters who could negotiate a solution.

So, like, do managers actually optimize labor to the point where they earn their keep? I can't tell, and I think that we ought to measure.

> I don't understand where this idea that managers are merely irrelevant middlemen who have no impact on the people they manage comes from.

Oh, it's worse than that; the typical manager has a net negative impact on their direct reports, from what I've seen.

> And, as with almost any other job, a manager that fails to contribute will be replaced much like any other underperforming employee.

I no longer believe that you have been gainfully employed in a corporate hierarchy. This line gave you away.

If we accept this logic as true, wouldn't it incentivize builders to increase housing supply? They would want to capture those higher rents and prices, right?

Second, who said anything about the rate of change going to zero? Even if productivity suddenly dropped to 1948 levels, it’s not like we’d be living in 1948. It’s not a time machine.

* Spend valuable time with a young child

* Relax at the park

* Spend time with family and friends

* Take care of household chores or administrative life tasks that one has been procrastinating on

* Go hiking

* Read a book

* Watch a show or movie

* Learn a new skill or start a new hobby

* Build a website or start a blog that isn't profitable but adds value to the world

Lower level employees often think they know which managers are baggage, and sometimes they're right, but often they're not seeing the whole picture. A manager who appears to be baggage from one perspective is sometimes performing crucial activities that are only visible from other perspectives. Management value added often can't be objectively measured but yet it exists all the same.

But that's not what this study did. Crucially, the disincentive to create only applies to low income earners. Under, UBI everyone pays the taxes and thus everyone gets that disincentive to work. If we want to see what UBI would do, we should actually do UBI.

Yes it’s an avoidance of the real problems. Basically a nice looking pipe dream.

Some would remain for private supplemental plans or whatever, but 90+% of that work would just go away. Plus all those uncompensated hours individuals spend fucking with insurance and medical provider billing departments.

I have a friend who moved to Alaska last year for work last year and will probably be there for a few more years. We had discussions about the fund recently because this is the first year he qualifies for it. He will very much be in that camp of using the check in the fall to splurge and will do so until he is able to move in a few years.

As an outsider, it seems frustrating to me that the funds aren't used to improve the state (schools, utilities, infrastructure). I've expressed this to my friend and kind of derided him a bit for being what I see as part of the problem. In reality I guess I can't really blame him for taking the money and (eventually) running, but it just feels wrong to me.

Btw, the Norwegian model is partial about avoiding 'Dutch disease'. That's why they invest the money abroad. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

Now that the annual oil revenue has declined, there's debate every year about what to do with that principal. AK has been cutting services the last few years, even though we have almost $70b in the bank.