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Comment by janandonly | Hacker News Reader

Interesting how political parties are for or against this pilot project before the results are known. What happened to gathering evidence first and then making up one's mind? There have been other projects in Canada, Finland,Kenya and the Netherlands, all with “positive” results.

It is useful to ask what you are trying to achieve with an UBI?

* lift people out of poverty?

* save money on other social schemes, like pensions, disability payments, schooling or housing subsidies?

* save money on secondary effects of poverty (like lower average health, or more mental and psychological problems)?

* make everyone's life “better” (if so, define better)?

* boost the economy?

I am going to conduct my own personal UBI experiment starting February 2022. I will be gifted €1.000 per month for 48 months... and I am thinking about maybe blogging or vlogging or instagramming about my experiences.... Any suggestions from the HN crowd?

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Part of the reason for this lack of interest in the actual outcome is that state benefits are one of the main battlegrounds in the UK's culture war. A lot of the Tories' base comes from the ideological position that poorer people don't deserve to receive aid at the expense (via taxes) of richer people. Whether or not UBI achieves any of its stated aims is totally irrelevant once you see things that way.

All the arguments about disincentivising work are, IMO just convenient filler. If you categorically disproved them, their proponents would surely just find another macro-economic rationalisation for their beliefs, which are in truth fundamentally moral.

> All the arguments about disincentivising work are, IMO just convenient filler

Not sure, I've read articles online about companies in the US struggling to hire because people are being paid more by the government. The counter to this is that companies should pay more. Undoubtedly some could afford to do this, but others... the mom & pop outfits... may not be able to.

In the US, it’s not UBI; it’s unemployment which you lose if you work. If UBI isn’t lost via work (other than via taxes, of course), the same issue does not arise at nearly the same magnitude.

It's a binary choice right now. You either work or you get the enhanced unemployment benefits.

With the extra $300 / week benefit, in my state (Ohio), the total benefit works out to a little under $20 / hour. Note that this is a sliding scale and earning that much would require you have at least that high of a wage previously.

What you end up seeing is a lot of margin in terms of how much someone is willing to give up in working wages to just collect unemployment. There has also been a lot of interest, and even competition, of workers seeking voluntary layoffs for companies that need some staff reduction.

I've heard a number of arguments using this as evidence that UBI will be a huge economic negative because it will reduce the workforce but I'm not sure how this can really be a valid proxy since the unemployment benefits are completely dependent on you not working. It seems pretty reasonable that if people could collect some basic income and also work for an even higher wage, they would.

There are a few instances of being able to collect both right now. I've heard of some people who manage manual labor type companies (painters, tree trimmers, landscapers, etc) that offer to pay laborers cash (which would be in addition to the unemployment benefits) and they cannot get workers. It's like the unemployment is a high enough amount that they'd rather collect just that and not work to earn more. Perhaps there is a magical amount which would convince people to collect benefits and still work to earn additional money.

Or perhaps manual laborers are more ethical than you give them credit for in the post above and choose not to lie and cheat to double-dip unemployment while actually working.

This might be the case for some individuals, but in the examples I have been given, this was not the issue.

if a company is unable to pay people a wage with which they are able to live comfortably the company should not exist

Thank you for deciding for me how much should I work for.

sorry, code monkeys can take as little money as they want

everyone else can have livable wages

I have significant sympathy for that base’s point of view.

It’s one thing to say that we must provide a social safety net for the most vulnerable, whether temporarily or permanently so.

It’s quite another to say “work should be optional and the basics of life should be provided for all [via the work of others]”.

I think you’ll find a few people who object to my 2nd paragraph, but extending the argument to the 3rd is a jump where you’ll lose a great number of reasonable people.

What do we do when automation reaches most jobs?

Create artificial jobs to keep people busy?

Now that I think about it, that seems to be what we have been doing for some 30-40 years now.

By artificial jobs, I mean jobs that if they disappeared, life would go on pretty much the same. This was in fact quite visible during all the lock-downs. Many many people no longer worked and all the essential and many non-essential things where still produced.

Probably the same thing we did when agriculture went from 70% of the workforce to under 1.5%. People will adapt to fill new demands.

If it comes to pass at some future time that machines can do all the work and everyone can live a Garden of Eden existence, goods and services will be so cheap due to their natural abundance, that UBI might be feasible but food and essentials might be almost not worth the trouble of metering.

We’re really, really far from that being a reality or concern, IMO.

But why are we forcing people to work for the essentials when the essentials (water, food, shelter) require a tiny fraction of the population and resources?

Is this the kind of society that we want to live in? Where trough automation and first mover advantage we allow people to be ridiculously rich while the rest of the population struggles to get by?

I agree with this 100%. The most effective UBI is providing water, food, shelter and all the other essentials + some cash for extra, where the cash part can be small.

As the time goes on and our society gets richer, we would include more things into the essentials (holidays, a personal vehicle, etc.)

I imagine this is an uncomfortable thought for many people on HN. How many folks are essentially creating CRUD apps of dubious value all day long and lying to themselves that what they provide is of great value to society simply because it is compensated well?

IMO modern society can easily support the needs (and wants, for that matter) of ourselves with just a fraction of the workers we have. So we create busywork for the rest so they feel useful and can participate in the economy. Maybe welfare should be reorganized like today's big corporations and the gov't can become the employer of last resort. It's not like we haven't basically done that in the past.

> lying to themselves that what they provide is of great value to society simply because it is compensated well?

high compensation doesn't require that it is valuable to society - only that it's valuable to the person paying the compensation!

And whether the person paying (aka, an employer) is getting value for money is irrelevant. If they are not getting value for money, they will eventually bankrupt. The invisible hand and all that.

> easily support the needs ... with just a fraction of the workers we have

so you would usurp the labour of those fraction of workers, so that the rest can live off it, work-free? Why would those fraction of workers agree to such exploitation? What's in it for them?

>How many folks are essentially creating CRUD apps of dubious value all day long and lying to themselves that what they provide is of great value to society simply because it is compensated well?

Well, I thought about it, my employer wants a CRUD app but is it really necessary? Is there no other way to do it? I mean, if they had to pay Silicon Valley wages it would not be very easy to justify paying that much, so it boils down to why the employer wants the CRUD app, not how much you are being paid.

Well, the first potential reason would be that it is 100% superfluous and the employer is just following a CRUD app trend and doesn't want to miss out. I somehow doubt that this is the case but things are never black and white. In this case the wage is arbitrarily high or low.

The second potential reason is that the CRUD app is replacing an alternative, presumably the problem the CRUD app is solving has to be solved and if it is not done via a CRUD app it would be done manually by office workers. The CRUD app therefore saves my employer the cost of hiring more data entry people for example. I find this to be likely. I can crank out 3 CRUD apps per year. Assuming all three CRUD apps combined increase productivity enough to cut one data entry job (technically they were never hired in the first place) and the app is good for 3 years that means I can charge up to 3 years of salary for one year of work. The benefit to society is that people don't have to waste their life on trivial problems.

The third potential reason is that the CRUD app is the only way to solve the problem, essentially the CRUD app lets us solve a problem that is otherwise impossible to solve. In this case compensation depends entirely on how much income solving the problem brings in and thus my wage is bounded by that income. In this case the wage could be arbitrary as well but it would be tied to solving a problem. I consider this a significant driver of wages in Silicon Valley but the CRUD apps I am writing are not in this category. The benefit to society is that the problem has been solved at all.

> “work should be optional and the basics of life should be provided for all [via the work of others]”

The answers to this are:

provocative: work is already optional for holders of large capital - if it works for them, why not the rest of us?

humanitarian: everyone deserves decency (and we have enough to go around)

utopian: we are/will be rich in everything we need, so we do not need to work for basics - we will only need to work for the betterment of ourselves, our culture and civilization

practical pessimist: if we don't give the poor enough to keep them on board of the system, they will oppose it and we will have civil war

practical optimist: if we give the poor what they need to live without a fight, they can focus on working on themselves to lift themselves up - it will be a win-win situation

practical realist: taxes (and exemptions) and benefits are so complex, it would be cheaper to use UBI and probably fairer as well

I'm in the practical optimism/realism camp, although my lizard brain sometimes gets angry at some of the "the poor deserve no better, it's a fair system - they just have to work"-people and will use the provocative argument.

It's not up to you to decide what to do with other people's money.

Feel free to donate all your money to the poor who deserve better; if you will use threat of violence to get someone else money (no matter the cause) I'll call you immoral.

The threat of violence enforced the system that let them get the money (with a democratic government's name printed on it, mind you) to begin with. Was violence immoral when it enforced a system that shaped wages and the returns of capital in such-and-such way?

violence only enforces contracts, which are formal promises. Violence doesn't enforce market rates for wages, demand and supply and other market forces.

Is this in your ideal system? Because that is really far from being true.

I'm not deciding what to do with other peoples money and I am not threatening anyone with violence.

We decide these things together through the democratic process.

I know it is hard for people like you, who reject democracy and any kind of power anyone could have over them, it must feel terrible to not be able to escape a system you disagree with. But I also think that on the spectrum of systems we had, it is not really fair so scream "taxation is theft" and "social security is immoral" at democracy, if you consider what we had before.

Nice overview, I'm an utopian. :) I'm trying to speedup the transition to a post scarcity society, currently building a company to automate food prep.

I think both three and two are similar statements: you already decided it's ok to forcefully get money from people, you may as well make it clear without hiding behind being charitable to poor people. It's a basic psychological trick.

Of course they’re similar in part. That’s why I introduced them together: to explore the spectrum.

I’ve decided that it’s ok for me to wait hand and foot and serve the every need (as best I can understand it) of my child when they’re under 1 year old but that it’s not okay to do the same when they’re 10, 20, and 30 years old.

A similar thing can be obviously reasonable in one scenario and unreasonable in another without representing a rift in cosmic consistency.

I would be all for the 3rd paragraph.

I'm a programmer living in a first world country (spent the first two and a half decades of my life in a third world shit hole) . I have a modicum of financial responsibility.

This means before I reach my 40s I'll have more than enough to live indefinitely off my investments. While gaining money.

I am not that smart. I am not incredibly hard working. And yet with less than 20 years of work,starting without debts and less than £1000 in my name I'll have enough to live off the money that my money makes (well, unless the world's stock market permanently crashes)

There is something deeply wrong with the financial and governamental systems if they can sustain me like that but they can't sustain most of the population.

> they can sustain me like that but they can't sustain most of the population.

you got lucky. The skills you had was a right fit for the times.

What the gov't needs to do is to up-skill people so that they can provide for themselves. This will take a lot of effort, but i do believe that such investment is worth it. Rather than UBI, or any sort of welfare that encourages people to stop working.

In few decades there will just not be enough jobs in which humans are more convenient to employ than robots and AIs.

Up-skilling is just delaying the problem we will face when there is not enough offer to match the demand for jobs.

There aren't any financial and governmental systems sustaining you, it's you offering what the market wants and can't get enough of. It may be luck in your case, it was calculated choice in my case; most people would be able to make the choice if they really cared to (and sure, let's offer welfare to those who couldn't possibly make this choice). Help other people get in your position or donate your money, but don't force others to sponsor people's resignation.

>There aren't any financial and governmental systems sustaining you, it's you offering what the market wants and can't get enough of

I use public utilities like streets, the NHS, and a stocks and shares account that I won't pay taxes on gains when I start living off it.

The main thing that will allow me to not work is having a certain amount of money that is making me money.

If I were to have a kid they would be financially independent too, simply by inheriting my wealth (as long as they were financially responsible).

Just having money is enough to generate income without having to ever work in your life.

Your parents didn't pay taxes? Mine paid unthinkable amounts of money (without even considering interest compounding) and that's what the infrastructure was built with; the government certainly didn't create it out of thin air. New infrastructure is paid for with my taxes - and my parents are still active too. If your parents never paid then be thankful to those who did, not governments.

Sure, your money makes you money - you made enough to live off capital gains, these are taxed - and capital gains are usually money taxed in multiple layers - and you can give that money to others, e.g. your children but you could choose anyone else.

I don't see how that's relevant to anything here though... Yes, your children, partner or maybe your extended family or best friend will be considered very lucky - but why does that mean that all others - most of whom aren't as lucky as you or calculating as me and have much less money - must sponsor other people's work-less lifes?

I wouldn't ask if this meant that nobody has to work ever again, but that is not the case right? The reality is that a lot of people will have to work a lot harder to make life work-less for a much smaller group of people content with merely surviving. The world isn't just rich/poor... - and simply distributing government welfare evenly among all people will never work, many people require much bigger amounts to even stay alive due to their health.

If you consider yourself overly lucky, donate to a charity or research, and your government certainly accepts excess taxes if you ask, but don't force this onto others.

I think you're reading more than there is on my comments.

Why are you so obsessed with 'luck'? I haven't even said that word once in this thread.

>Your parents didn't pay taxes?

Never said they didn't. Only that I won't pay taxes over the gains of most of my investments.

Not sure how inheritance tax works, but my hypothetical child wouldn't need to work either.

So what is up with this system where that can happen with a modest amount of money but people have to work?

>The reality is that a lot of people will have to work a lot harder to make life work-less for a much smaller group of people content with merely surviving

You sure about that? Because merely surviving is quite cheap nowadays and the vast majority of people aren't happy with merely surviving.

People don't have to work, they can do exactly the same thing you did, and then their children don't have to work just like yours. That seems perfectly fair to me - of course as I said, let's offer welfare to those who are unable to make these choices, but most people are able to.

>There is something deeply wrong with the financial and governamental systems if they can sustain me like that but they can't sustain most of the population.

No, that just means there are a lot of people below your living standard who are willing to work for you, in exchange for the resources you have accumulated over your life. You are also owning machines that make it possible to sustain yourself and some of the labor input is necessary but not the primary driver of value.

Think about how much a human tractor driver contributes to how much food is being produced vs how much the tractor contributes. Without the tractor the driver could have never possibly farmed that much food.

>No, that just means there are a lot of people below your living standard who are willing to work for you, in exchange for the resources you have accumulated over your life.

This doesn't bother you at all? Do note that if I planned to have a descendant they wouldn't have to work either (my financial independence is relying on an income instead of having so much money that I couldn't spend it in my lifetime)

I think you saving for the future rather than immediately consuming 100% or more of the value you produce is laudable and starting your descendants, if any, with the fruits of your under-consumption is therefore fine.

You could spend it all in your lifetime; you’re just choosing not to.

I agree it's a moral issue, I spent a significant amount of time thinking about the subject and my conclusion is that forcing people to give away their money is immoral, no matter how good the cause you're contributing money to.

After interviewing several people, I reached the conclusion most people don't think at all about the issue and have therefore incredibly inconsistent philosophical positions on issues.

There's more to it. The biggest problems,in my opinion,is not the fact that poor Joe is benefiting from not to so poor Jack's tax payments via benefits. The problem starts when there's no end to the support. For instance, you can be on housing benefits for years and that's wrong. The system is poorly implemented and some deeply structural problems never get addressed ( e.g. long term unemployment in a family, single mothers with children and their ability to work+ raise children, etc). Most of these issues require a wide spectrum of solutions,often interlinking with each other,but nobody really want to change anything apart from add/remove a few quid off the benefits payments.

> It is useful to ask what you are trying to achieve with an UBI?

There is suggestions that paying everyone a UBI is actually cheaper than the current approaches to benefit payments. No more means testing, no more form filling, no more benefits offices or case workers etc, no more physical offices filled with admin staff doing stuff, no more claiming a benefit when you are not entitled to it and having to pay it back again in your tax return to avoid missing out on a state pension (this specifically refers to weird child benefit rules in the UK) Everyone gets the same regardless.

That feels like a nice idea to me, but I have no idea if it is actually true or not.

I know for me personally I have the nice problem of earning too much for a lot of widely vaunted benefits (e.g. childcare, child benefit as mentioned above, tax free allowance etc). It would be nice personally if a lot of these cut-offs and clauses and caveats and minimum/maximum levels and then reporting it in your tax return just went away and everyone just got £500 a month or whatever.

I.e. reduce complexity and the machinery needed to run and police it.

> for or against this pilot project before the results are known

> all with “positive” results.

Call this lack of self awareness. Do you have any study that looks into the long term effect of this scheme with data. AFAIK, there had been multiple programs of UBI going all the way to 1960s[1] and each time government cancelled it for some reason, so calling it one word positive if got cancelled is bit of overreach.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_pilots

Because a rational government would never cancel anything that is positive?

Well, by thayt standard this planet has zero rational governments.

People usually don't particularly care for the truth, they care for what they think is the truth, and what support their opinions.

As for suggestions : It's pretty vague, but how about doing projects in things that you're interested in ? Like maybe creating a prototype for an energy drink, buy a lot of different ingredients to find new recipes, or buy tools for drawing and create a comic...

Or read up on a problem your city has, and work on it.

>they care for what they think is the truth, and what support their opinions.

I'd take this one step further and say that the majority of people don't have consistent opinions about what the truth is, they only care for receiving the informational stimuli they've been conditioned to perceive as pleasant.

UBI is therefore an experiment in nomenclature. The reality of governments giving money over long periods of time to citizens whose labor is not market-competitive is nothing new. What's being tested is how it's branded: "welfare, benefits" is a humanistic, "socialist" way of branding it while "universal, basic, income" are words more in line with the rationalistic, "neoliberal" memeplex.

It seems like many politicians have a very emotional reaction to these kinds to experiments, seemingly afraid that the results will contradict their beliefs or that they'll somehow be at a loss.

And it's not just one or the other side either, since it looks like UBI could address a lot of issues (ie overall govt waste) the entrenched bureaucracy is by default resistant to it.

I’d argue what is happening in the US is already a country wide test. People are taking the benefits rather than going to work for marginally more. It is not a good outcome for society. And high benefits countries like France know that very well. Lots of harder job openings there are never filled even though the country has a permanent large unemployment. I like the idea of UBI on paper but I feel it is counterproductive in practice.

UBI is supposed to be universal. Under UBI the choice would be get the 'free money' and also work or just get the 'free money'. Under unemployment insurance, you generally can't keep getting benefits when you are working, so it's not the same choice.

This is a challenge with a lot of benefits programs; the change in income often doesn't seem to justify the change in labor. If you get the same UBI payment regardless of if you're working or not, the disincentive to work, because it ends your benefit isn't there; of course, the disincentive to work, because working is work is still there.

That’s not the point. The point is that you have a basic revenue doing nothing, and only a marginally higher revenue if you work. How you segment these revenues isn’t the problem.

Perhaps those harder jobs should be paid more and people would then apply.

I think that for most people most of the time, economics falls in the category of things that they evaluate using their moral sense, rather than their practical sense. The important question for them is not whether the UBI works to achieve a specific goal, but whether it is moral or immoral.

The results have been in for a long time now: If you pay people to stay at home and do nothing, people will stay at home and do nothing.

> Interesting how political parties are for or against this pilot project before the results are known. What happened to gathering evidence first and then making up one's mind?

Would you run a pilot of every idea? At the level of a country?

Paying everyone in Wales £ 1 is a big endeavor, let alone a value that's meaningful and on a monthly basis, so it's not as if a pilot comes at no cost. You could certainly form an opinion from experiments in other places, or economic thought expirements or from wherever it is politicians pull most of their thoughts.

> It is useful to ask what you are trying to achieve with an UBI?

Remove poverty trap and improve dignity in social programs. Many social programs already offer equivalent money but they are means-tested. Effort to get more income may lead to not being eligible for these programs, which is essentially equivalent to very high effective marginal tax rate, discouraging people to try.

> I am going to conduct my own personal UBI experiment starting February 2022. I will be gifted €1.000 per month for 48 months

This is interesting and I’m not sure what you mean. Are you picking a random person and giving them a thousand euros per month? Or are you spending a thousand among multiple people?

There are lots of charities with consistent donations from people (eg, effective altruism pledges) so I’m unclear what your experiment is or will show other than other patronages.

My employer has been running an experiment for a few years where every month they give me a few thousand.

My suggestion is to blog or vlog under a pseudonym because almost no one on either side of the political spectrum will be able to approach your situation rationally.

> Interesting how political parties are for or against this pilot project before the results are known.

Economists know the results, they don’t need to run such experiments.

It’s like Socialism or rent control, the basic laws of economics will already tell you the outcome.

It just happens that lots of people think that economics is no hard science which doesn’t allow for such predictions.

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