Universal basic income doesn’t impact worker productivity | Hacker News Reader

Universal basic income doesn’t impact worker productivity

academictimes.com

Printing this headline is downright irresponsible given the study population:

> Researchers recruited 900 individuals to take part in the experiment, 59% of whom were female and 98% of whom were university students.

Woah yeah. That skews things drastically.

I was expecting the clickbait to have the classic flaws, small sample size, participants knowing it was a limited-time experiment, and other actors in the economy not being on UBI.

This study is so comically limited that they didn't get to those classic flaws.

When I worked with a university partnered research lab, it wasn't uncommon to have a heavily biased sample based on the university student population. The students were significantly easier to tap into and often cheaper if compensation was involved.

With that said, if there's an IRB process for any sort of human subject work, it's always skirting along the ethically grey area to do this. So, not only is your data biased towards a specific subpopulation (concentrated age groups, often concentrated socioeconomic statuses, etc.), faculty are often on the verge of unethical conduct with students.

98% is pretty high even for the cheapest of faculty I interacted with.

What is expensive is having to live on a financial cliff where even responsible actors occasionally fall off, devastating their productivity for years as they re-establish themselves, and for those that do suffer from other destabilizing conditions, they may never recover to become productive once again. If a financial disaster hits when you have children, those children will suffer its consequences, perhaps for decades, further inhibiting productivity. It is my strong opinion that a basic income stabilizes a productive population that will likely enjoy generational compounding of the basic income investment.

This whole academic branch is the included the reproducibility project.

Papers sit at about flip of a coin repeatability.

In either case, if there's no change in net productivity, why spend the money to do it?

If we are to assume hypothesis that the headline is correct.

There are multiple benefits and insights that can be drawn.

1. People on UBI are not just going to take money stop working. This is one of the biggest counter argument for UBI - people are lazy and be drain on society.

2. People are still productive and if given UBI they have space to take risk and become entrepreneurs. A lot of people might have a idea/dream to start a business but due to mortgage, low income etc they cannot risk the well being of their families.

3. If UBI doesn't reduce productivity then you are injecting money into local economies via local people. This is literally supporting businesses that local people want to have around.

4. The whole social welfare department can be largely disbanded.

5. There was some crazy percentage of people that has no more then $1000 in account (left then month of spending). UBI would help people cope with emergencies. There is known effect of people in crisis falling into a hole due to the fight or flight mechanism. They literally cannot think straight and are being preyed upon by quick payday loan vulchers.

6. Jobs that are awful will have to be paid more to be done. I am not sure if thats good or bad. Depends who you are.

7. Young people would not be rushed to find job, or be fast track into school-uni-work thread. It would give people chance to find out what they like to do in life rather than roll dice and be stuck in career they don't like. Personally i believe you should have a few year gap between high school and university to get a taste for the different jobs.

Hows that for a list?

This isn't a surprising outcome but it goes against a commonly used argument against everything from a UBI to a social safety net to a cooperative society. People want to work, they want to produce and they want to feel accomplished.

If our economy's only hope relies on threatening a large class of people with homelessness, destitution, starvation and even death unless they work, then our economy is immoral at its core.

Not to mention the threat of becoming ill bankrupting us. Even someone who has saved a goodly sum can lose it all if the insurance they have purchased taps out.

I can tell quite a few people here didn’t read the article. The study was comically insufficient to support the headline.

Perhaps it would at $10K USD/mo, but at truly basic levels it’s often a productivity boost to allow people to not spend their free time doing things they could easily outsource. It’s expensive to be poor.

If there's one thing Covid related shutdowns have shown, it's that vast numbers of people, in not very productive jobs, could be unemployed with minimal economic impact. Unemployment and labor (non-)participation rates have risen drastically, sometimes by 10s of percentage points, but overall GDP has dropped by only 5-8% in the most impacted countries, including the US and EU.

Unemployed people have economic impact, obviously. They consume their savings, increase debt, or are a tax burden on others (or all of the above). If they consume savings mainly, they may even show up as a positive influence on GDP. But it's not very sustainable, because for most people's savings are quite limited, and consuming them because they're forced to by circumstances is not really good for them.

Why should it matter if it impacts worker productivity? The whole point is that as more jobs are automated people work less and can still live.

a common argument against UBI is 'They'll just become lazy bums.'

I'm old enough to see the difference that lower apartment rents and health insurance cost made in people's lives. One used to be able to live in places like coastal California on retail/etc jobs without needing a college degree.

I'm not against UBI but feel like that is just trying to fix a symptom (in the USA at least).

...at least in the short run. And in the long run, to paraphrase Keynes, we're all dead anyway, so we might as well try it in more places and with more groups of people who seem "stuck" in poverty, and measure the results.

Not even "One study suggests..." in the title!

This was highly artificial experiment with college students who "were asked to work on a set of tasks and were paid based on their performance".

I like UBI from an efficiency perspective in that you would assume we could eliminate much of the overhead associated with social offices.

However there is something about being put on an allowance that bothers me. It’s rather infantilizing and I wonder about the politics of it. I could see a party using it to buy votes - “elect us and you’ll get more money each month.”.

It wound do wonders for the drug and alcohol industries, casinos, and state lotteries though. How many boys would never leave their moms basement?

If anything it’s a huge risk to the USD remaining a global reserve currency. Why would non-Americans take it seriously when it’s passed out to millions of people every month?

The alternatives to UBI are either no welfare, which creates many problems, or what we have now, means tested welfare.

Surely it's more infantilising that instead of an allowance you have the government provide some of your food and housing while checking up on you to make sure you are not cheating.

Well I think the main idea behind welfare and EBT is that it isn’t supposed to be a lifestyle. It’s supposed to be something that helps a person during tough times until they can become independent.

I do agree that UBI simplifies the entire thing. I’m just suspicious of the potential consequences.

I've heard multiple peers worry about runaway inflation if UBI were enacted.

UBI is a death sentence within direct democracies short of robot/AI provided abundance. Introduction beforehand sows the seed for a direct transfer of wealth from the 49% haves to the 51% have-nots.

You state this as fact when it is clearly an opinion about what would happen with a UBI. Moreover, if UBI was implemented as a tax refund, then there is plenty of precedent for not being alarmed.

> Introduction beforehand sows the seed for a direct transfer of wealth from the 49% haves to the 51% have-nots.

And why is that inherently bad? It may be bad (I happen not to think so) but would like more than a bare assertion that that is the case.

For example, in favor: from an economics PoV, increased liquidity and discretionary income on the part of the poorer population should increase economic activity (e.g. velocity of money) which is good for business.

It simultaneously incentivises skilled emigration and unskilled immigration. It would drive an exodus of any entrepreneurial talent.

> It would drive an exodus of any entrepreneurial talent.

Why?

Depends how much the transfer is. It sound like the implication is a lot. In which case entrepreneurs will move to where their potential returns aren’t dampened. Same reason people have moved TO silicone valley, ambitions of outsized rewards..

Or help fund early stage companies, and otherwise make it feasible to take small risks which improve capital fluidity and transaction/innovation velocity. Not every entrepreneur is a petulant nomad.

Skilled emmigration to where? Europe, Britain, and Canada have as much if not more hindrances, no?

While I imagine it could easily be nitpicked in some fashion, it could be the case that automation values/milestones/something were used to determine the total amount to be distributed evenly among citizens (rather than an arbitrary number).

> UBI is a death sentence within direct democracies

Direct democracies are virtually nonexistent at the national level; Switzerland, which is still a mostly-representative democracy, is probably the closest thing there is.

> Introduction beforehand sows the seed for a direct transfer of wealth from the 49% haves to the 51% have-nots.

Means-tested welfare plus taxation, which most countries have, does that, too; I don't see how UBI is any more dangerous in that regard, nor do I see the runaway spiral of voting unsustainable benefits anywhere, despite the popular meme that this is the natural consequence of democratic control of the public purse. So, before I take this particular slippery slope argument seriously, I'm going to need to see some convincing argument of how UBI is different in some relevant way.

The dose makes the poison. The universal nature drastically increases the proportion, from a single-digit minority to a majority approaching 99%, who stand to benefit from increased redistribution. From there it's a spiral to complete redistribution.

But if the threat is people voting to expand it, they can just as easily vote to expand means tested welfare, and just as many people “stand to benefit”. There doesn't seem to be any basis at all to the speculation that UBI crosses some divide where this effect—which has long been used as an argument against democracy itself though it has never been demonstrated—will suddenly become real.

You're describing an artificial minority maintained through means-testing. That's not UBI.

Yes, means-tested welfare is different than UBI. But it's not different in a way that I see any coherent argument makes UBI more prone to being turned into a transfer from the wealthier bare-minority to the poorer bare-minority through democratic process. (Classically, that threat is an argument against democracy generally, recently it's been retooled as an argument against UBI; in both forms its a narrative appealing to the assumed ignorance and venality of the masses that doesn't seem to have much support in actual behavior of real democratic systems.)

the whole "nobody is gonna work with UBI" was started by people who benefit from this endless exploitation of serfdom.

I really don’t get the excitement about UBI. The US is not that rich of a country. Giving everyone $1,000 per month will cost $39t per year. US gpd is $21t per year. Maybe 50 or 100 years with some quantum leap in AI or something in likes.

[My bad my math here is bad. Should be $3.9t not $39t. My initial point stands though. It's just too much money.]

Your math is off by a factor of 10. Giving 330 million people $12k/yr is only $4 trillion/yr.

Double-check your arithmetic.

$3.9t not $39t.

Think about it, US GDP can't be less than $1k per person per month.

Should that be 3.9T per year? (330,000,000121000)

I'm probably missing something, but 12,000$ * 328 millions = 3.9 T$, not 39?

That money gets spent and comes back as tax revenue.

If you think UBI is expensive, wait until you find out how expensive it will be to have a hundred million unemployed (as a result of automation for one).

You give people money, they spend it on goods created by robots which are taxed, earning money to hand out to everyone as a dividend for being an owner in the national enterprise.

In addition to the missing zero, you'd hardly have everyone on UBI. Only those without jobs.

Keyword: Universal basic income.

Yes but UBI is offset by more taxes at higher income brackets. Most specific UBI proposals are 10x cheaper than 3.9b.

$2.8t was the estimate for Andrew Yang's 1,000/mo for all adults. US gdp is 21t, so roughly 1/7th US gdp.

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