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Comment by fzingle | Hacker News Reader

This kind of concern crops up in UBI discussions all the time, but I think it gets things backwards.

Instead of asking if some significant number of jobs will go unfilled because people are paid a poverty line level of income by the government, we should be asking:

"Why aren't we paying people who work 40hrs/wk a living wage?"

The decision not to work and live off of UBI is only attractive to people who are currently working many hours and earning about the same as what UBI is offering -- and that should give us pause.

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> The decision not to work and live off of UBI is only attractive to people who are currently working many hours and earning about the same as what UBI is offering

The evidence of people usually choosing to retire upon reaching the age they are able to receive much smaller stipends than their current earnings suggests otherwise. Many people value their free time highly, and a poverty wage to a single parent living in rented accommodation can be quite comfortable when doubled and applied to a homeowning couple with savings for rainy days.

Sure you can find an edge case in my general statement.

> The evidence of people usually choosing to retire

The key word in that is "choosing". A huge number of people even in G7 countries comprise the working poor. They cannot, and likely will never be able to "choose" to retire. They work 40hrs/wk, often with two incomes and have no savings.

While we can debate the life choices of some of these people, it remains that working 40hrs/wk should not lead to an outcome where you can only just scrape by.

It's hardly an 'edge case' to point out that in the real world, 90% of people guaranteed to receive a low income for the rest of their life in the form of a pension no longer work. This pretty much unequivocally falsifies the claim that only people on very low incomes would consider accepting a large drop in income in order to cease working.

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