Hacker News Reader

Comment by m1117 | Hacker News Reader

People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment :/ UBI seems like a good motivation and a fun experiment, looking forward to hopefully AY launching it in NYC.

View on HN

>People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment

It's not all people do this or all people do that. It 100% happens that some people on government benefits (unemployment, etc.) choose to stay on these benefits for their entire duration and then pursue work opportunities.

Much of this has to do with well understood welfare cliffs. Sure, some people won't work if they have the option for a menial existence on welfare. Many more would like to increase their income, but would suffer loss of healthcare, housing, or other necessities if they do.

>People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment

hasn't this been debunked repeatedly? While yes, Im sure there are some people who do their hardest not to work to collect money, most people want to be out there working.

I dont think youre correct per se, but I do think that part of the reason people linger on unemployment is because jobs that they are able to get dont pay nearly enough as unemployment, thus there is no incentive to get back to work.

I know someone who is fighting this. It's not so much they don't want to work, but the fact that with our current system there are places where working causes you to earn less. Unemployment is one piece, but food stamps and other benefits get cut off as well. Working costs money. Commuting, child care, uniforms, etc. For a person with children, a minimum wage job is tough to justify.

A system where government help was tapered until people were above the poverty line would eliminate these perverse incentives.

>People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment

It's not all people do this or all people do that. It 100% happens that a non-trivial percentage of people on government benefits (unemployment, etc.) choose to stay on these benefits for their entire duration and only then pursue work opportunities.

And in traditional fashion many people (mostly just one group, lets be honest..) throw out the baby with the bathwater on social safety nets. Because some people exploit it, the people who need it get damned.

edit: Edited to be a bit less pointed... A bit.

It seems weird to be criticizing a group for identifying a problem that actually exists (welfare traps / phase out cliffs / perverse incentives) while proposing a solution to it that would actually work better (NIT/UBI). There are proponents of a negative income tax on both sides, e.g. conservative economist Milton Friedman.

I'm definitely not criticizing people for proposing an alternative. However, literally all of the .. group of people i know who might by lumped in that statement offer no alternative. Or rather, the alternative is a complete lack of social safety nets.

If you propose an alternative you're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I find a good way to get out of this tribalist mindset is to realize that the stereotypical member of a given party that believes all of the party's official positions is not a real person who actually exists. (Politicians and political operatives sometimes pretend to be but even they're not in reality.)

Some of the people who vote for Republicans oppose taxes. Just the existence of taxes at all. "Taxation is theft." If you want to help people, don't pay taxes to the government, give that money to a charity.

Others think that the US should have the strongest military in the world. An obviously incompatible idea, right? Good luck crowdfunding your fleet of aircraft carriers. But they're in the same party.

It's not an inconsistency because they're not the same people, even if they both vote for Republicans. The Republican party platform itself is incoherent. So is the Democratic party platform. They're not logically consistent sets of policies, they're just coalitions that evolved to gather enough votes to control the government half of the time.

But here's the secret. Nobody cares about things nobody wants. Both parties aren't just automatically the opposite of one another. It isn't that one of them is in opposition to Kill All Humans and the other one is in favor of that. For one of the parties to advance something, it has to be because there are enough people who think we should do that to make it worth a party's time to try to get those votes.

So screw the tribes. Convince the whole public that good ideas are good ideas and bad ideas are bad ideas. When there is consensus in the public there will be consensus in the parties.

If the party who already agrees with a good idea is in control at a given time then you take the win, but if you can't convince most of the country then it just gets reversed in a couple years and we can do better than that.

I don't think you can say "its not this way or that way" and then follow up with "its 100% this".

I didn't say "it's 100% this".

I was trying to convey that is a fact that some people do in fact do this.

> People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment :/

Do you have any evidence for this? This is not claimed in the article as far as I can tell. I don't understand how anyone might make that calculation. I don't believe any state pays your full salary while you were on unemployment. And it's time limited.

I know quite a few people who have either not looked for jobs because it would have meant less income overall, or refused promotions / higher salary for the same reasons.

This is a well known phenomenon known as the welfare trap [0].

This may not be the case if you have the opportunity to go from unemployed directly to a higher salary but most unemployed people have minimal wage as a best prospect, many times not even that.

UBI evens it out in that if you do get a job you'll make more money instead of downright trading your free time for busy time with no financial gain.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap

As an anecdote, my wife used to work in the front office of a low income apartment complex, and she said it was common for tenants to purposefully stay on welfare/unemployment, while getting paid under the table for stuff like landscaping and handyman work. Getting a normal job would have effectively been a pay cut for them.

Unemployment is only a minor part of this simply because it expires after a fixed duration. Housing and healthcare are much bigger factors. For many people, getting a job means losing their state funded healthcare and housing, but the income from the job is not enough to make up the difference.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com