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Comment by new_realist | Hacker News Reader

The last year and a half of pandemic aid has been a large scale experiment in universal basic income. The results seem to be somewhat expected: a labor shortage and high inflation.

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A UBI experiment with confounding variables: lockdown, schools closed, travel and tourism restricted, parts of the economy shutting down, job losses, women out of the workforce to take care of children, health care sector under stress, 734 thousand people dead etc.

If you can correlate UBI with labor shortage and high inflation from that data - then perhaps you were predisposed to that conclusion.

Lots of things have happened, but some are unrelated, and many have ceased. Extended unemployment benefits ceased last month. The expansion of the money supply remains. We’ll see if these problems resolve once the Fed tightens and asset prices crater (and replaced with a different set of problems, I imagine!).

> A UBI experiment with confounding variables: lockdown, schools closed, travel and tourism restricted, parts of the economy shutting down, job losses, women out of the workforce to take care of children, health care sector under stress, 734 thousand people dead etc.

Also, and more critical to its problems as a UBI experiment, without any UBI, just a bunch of conditional, mostly means-tested or not-working-tested, aid.

> The last year and a half of pandemic aid has been a large scale experiment in universal basic income.

No, it hasn’t. All the aid was conditional. Most of it was means tested, and much (both means tested and otherwise) had other tests. One of the largest portions was conditioned on not working.

Did you quit your job to get those very lucrative UBI payments?

Me neither.

Canada gave out a very "generous" $500 a week, which would not pay rent on anything outside of a 1B apartment in Toronto.

Why would quitting your job enable you to get UBI?

Because in many countries (like the Canada example mentioned above), "UBI" was conditional on being unemployed.

So it is not Universal, just using the name.

Correct. People calling this a “UBI experiment” are just co-opting the term.

Oh top of what everybody else mentioned, even in the case of an actual UBI I would expect there to be a bit of a rough transition if it were just flipped on. But soon a new equilibrium would be found, with more people generally doing what made them happy and some goods and services changing somehow to fit the new market realities.

But it would not be the end of the economy or anything… and I think once we made it through the transition we’d actually have a much better / happier / healthier economy.

Post hoc ergo proctor hoc fallacy. Just because something happened after UBI doesn’t necessarily mean it happens because of UBI.

Attributing the labor shortage to UBI is to ignore the fact that the original impetus for the payments was to allow people to continue to live while we fight off the spread of disease.

Also inflation has been low for a decade and we have people money at the same time the supply chain had to start dealing with selective border closures and businesses slowing operations due to disease outbreaks.

France has UBI since 1981 and it’s called RMI. We still have it. Let’s stop with this “large scale experiment”, we already have the results.

High unemployment, stagnant economy and frequent strikes?

RMI has been replaced with RSA, which is a form of negative income tax -- something championed by Milton Friedman and others of the Chicago school. It's not UBI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenu_de_solidarité_active

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