The 'universal' aspect of UBI is critical, and many of the attempts to test UBI seem to miss this completely. Call it something else in that case.
What is a $1000/month UBI? Using the 4% rule, it's equivalent to having investments worth $300000.
I have a feeling that a lot of people on HN have a portfolio worth $300000. Are you still working?
Note that this is one of the benefits of the UBI. As it is universal, if you get a job you will keep getting your UBI. So there will never be a time where this occurs if we switch. Work would always be incentivized.
because those that get onto FIRE earned it themselves, rather than off the backs of taxpayers like in UBI.
Inheritance isn't a handout from the taxpayer to private entities.
The amount of people who would continue their job if it wasn't for the money it's slim
I definitely wouldn't waste my time building someone else product and creating value for society. I'd likely build something fun I want to build which is unlikely to be useful for society or make money.
A large part of the populatin on would happily paint, cook, read books, watch movies, play videogames until they die - if they had the money.
I think UBI is largely untested and its proponents should proceed with caution. But I also think people are overconfident in assuming that people wouldn't work; the reality is that we don't have a ton of data in either direction.
If the 20th-21st century has taught us anything, it's that consumerism is a very powerful motivator. People like to have money to buy luxuries, most people don't want to sit on subsistence levels of income their entire lives. People want things. They want to buy videogames, and XBoxes, and nice houses, and cars, and iPhones, and to go to fancy restaurants.
Whether consumerism is a powerful enough motivator... I just think people are very over-confident talking about what is definitely going to happen in a system that has basically never been tried before.
> eventually as we see now shortages in just about everything
This is a pretty big jump in logic. We've had a ransomware account that shut down a gas pipeline, we've had mass business shutdowns in multiple countries that affected the entire economy, we've had a large shipping block. It's pretty hard to blame the current chip shortage on the stimulus.
I do not understand how people get so wildly confident about this stuff whenever UBI comes up. I would not be so confident to claim that supply shortages for materials/foods from other countries are being caused by a stimulus in the US, particularly during a period where our government policy was to specifically tell people that the responsible, social thing to do not to go into their jobs.
But also it's relatively unlikely that any of them have anything to do with the US stimulus. We import most of our chips.
I'm not even saying that shipping/factory shutdowns are the sole cause of inflation right now. But it's really overconfident to say that the stimulus is the cause of all of those increases, I think that's pretty unlikely to be the largest cause. It's just a pretty large oversimplification -- do people seriously believe that if a stimulus hadn't happened that shipping costs would have gone down during a pandemic?
Or, perhaps, that there is much attention on consumers who spend significantly as they have “louder” lifestyles that are easy to show.
Poverty rates are high with 14% of the US under the poverty line [0] and I don’t think consumerism is motivating them very much.
And I think it’s risky to equate considering as a large scale motivator based on extrapolating mass consumer behavior to all.
> Whether consumerism is a powerful enough motivator... I just think people are very over-confident talking about what is definitely going to happen in a system that has basically never been tried before.
People are really eager to look at populations and make very strong assertions about what their intrinsic motivators are with (in my mind) little evidence.
> and I don’t think consumerism is motivating them very much.
Are 14% of the population below poverty levels because they like living there? Because our systems discourage saving money once you're on wellfare? Because of market pressures? We have basically zero large-scale experiments, but people on both sides of the UBI test seem really confident that they know what everyone will do.
A really free labor market would be one where your life is not at risk if you refuse the job offer (as with UBI). In that situation, how much money would convince someone to accept your job? That's the real value of your job.
You got to raise the wages, not complain that people are finally able to reject your wage slavery.