Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

And so what if people refuse to do shitty jobs? Perhaps we as society can do without those jobs. And if we can't, we should value them more

Your point still stands for the professions for which abuse is part of the job by definition. However, I get the idea that too many industries are tolerating it while it could go away by having a culture change.

Another reason why one could argue it’s not the same as willingness to work is because if one is willing to work a job where abuse isn’t really common then you could say that person does have a willingness to work.

I think there would be a massive pressure to raise minimum wage.

Why would you work for $7.50 an hour and pay $1 in taxes - spending the majority of your day to make ~$50 - that doesn't buy much - and you don't have much time to spend it anyway?

When your options are either do that or be homeless and hungry - most people opt for work.

But when you have other options - spending your entire day to make $50 seems dramatically less appealing.

Not to excuse bad behavior, but one of the arguments for UBI is that it could help streamline the convoluted systems of government benefits; under a simpler basic-income system perhaps those callers would be fewer and less angry.

That implies your job currently doesn’t require those things. Does it mean you would continue to do the work you currently do?

I think a better phrasing to the hypothetical might be: “if my current job requires…”. And sure, you would leave that job, but does that mean you wouldn’t work at all?

Or does it mean you might use that free space to learn the skills to do a different job that wouldn’t treat you like such garbage.

It almost sounds like your conclusion is: “such a program would allow workers to reject abusive workplaces, and require management to ensure people didn’t abuse their workers if they would want any workers”. To which I say, don’t threaten me with a good time.

Maybe that's a good thing. It's insane how people in service industries are treated - like they're less than human. Shifting some power to them and giving the job a little more of an air of dignity or status would probably help a lot.

And the pay would obviously go up. People would be willing to do the job if it means life or death, but not for minimum wage - and that's a good thing.

To me, your argument says that UBI will cause a re-evaluation of the income market, where undesirable jobs will have to be priced higher so that employers still can find the employees they need (and the services will have to be priced accordingly). I'm okay with that outcome.

(in this particular case: I suspect that private companies will very quickly add language to their contract that being abusive to their employees will void the contract -- I'm okay with that outcome as well. In the case of government services, that could mean that the person would be required to only interact through an intermediary, like a legal guardian or social worker)

We literally just did this with COVID checks.

I would vote for the complete opposite of basic income - invest heavily in education, trade schools, colleges and free access to tools for learning, apprenticeships, etc. Give tools to people to become productive and sustain a good life, by also providing value to the society.

As for the jobs people won't do, those jobs will be higher valued and eventually, when the price is right, people will do them.

The angry people who don't want to work, who cheat the system won't have to (some still will, of course, but since everyone gets the same amount no matter what, there's less incentive and less frustration built into the system).

Finally, people who don't have the means to take risks will suddenly be able to. We will unlock their potential and the future will benefit as a result.

I just think it's a great idea all around.

Basic income experiments usually game it like this: We will give you x years of payments monthly for just being alive.

Then they see what happens. The problem is, policy has one huge difference. It doesn't end.

The difference between, I'll give you 2 years of payments monthly and then you'll have to take care of yourself the rest of your life is extraordinarily different than, I'll give you monthly inflation adjusted payments for life, there will be no point in the future when you will need to take care of yourself again.

Think about the FIRE movement. People are working to create an early retirement for themselves with the government not offering it. There will certainly be a percent of the population who retires with basic income.

- if we had guaranteed roof, we'd do different jobs, fill desire, aim at useful. A lot of people go to work with zero benefits being ability to pay rent. They dread it but they have no choice. It's a weird balance

- any task can be done, even being berated or doing petty tasks, you just dont have to do it from 9 to 5, all year long. You can do 2h if that pleases you. And those jobs now being recognized as nasty would be distributed differently or at least valued as such and workers doing it would feel appreciated

ps: our current system makes us angry at each others. very ironic.

As with most things related to worker protection, this presents a trade-offs. Some workers will be better off, whereas the customers that rely on them for services will end up paying more money for the same goods or services, a form of inflation.

I am not judging what is best here, I just want to point out that it's a trade-off.

And one observation: most of the HN audience is pretty well off, definitely middle class or above. So when someone says "Im ok with workers getting paid more and prices being more expensive" they are virtue signaling but forgetting that if you are poor, Walmart prices is what affords your lifestyle and even small increases disproportionally hurt the poor.

A second observation: you can't create wealth by giving everyone more money. To create wealth you need to increase supply and reduce real prices, which means increase productivity. I am not sure why this is not part of the UBI conversation.

A lot of shitty jobs out there rely on the fact that people need to settle to pay the bills. There are people with little experience or going through rough times who simply can't afford to wait for a good opportunity to come along, they need something to hold them over for a few months or maybe years. The employers know that these people have few options and will leave as soon as they do, so they offer low wages and overwork their staff and replace them when they are used up. UBI means people don't have to settle for the first low paying, undesirable job that comes along, they can hold out indefinitely for something better. Yeah, people are still going to need to get their foot in the door somewhere, and some opportunities might be too rare to be considered realistic, so we're not all going to be working our dream jobs, but the worst abusive employment anti-patterns will go extinct.

Having worked in a factory, there's no way I'd do that for free. Heck, even at my current salary, which is multiple times higher, I wouldn't want to do that again.

Also, if basic income is good enough then their wouldn't be a need for that kind of job :).

it does need balances tho, to prevent abuse, especially against undeclared workers double dipping the state (not paying labour taxes and getting the income)

basic incomes tho has a series of drawback that current experiment cannot easily handle.

the first one is of principle: it doesn't solve what caused poverty in the population, and unilaterally ties recipient survival to the benevolence of the ruling class - without a strong economy to zero involuntary unemployment, it begins to look a lot like vassalage.

the second one is of application: punctual welfare is inherently less efficient than aggregated action - living universal income + private school and private healthcare is just a way to bleed state resources into private coffers. public school and public healthcare are much more efficient, and then the supplementary income should just cover the remaining quota of needs (housing, food etc)

there's also second order effects tied to basic income inelasticity - if housing or schooling or whatever price raises, it can displace all the recipient from an area. it's not unrealistic to expect basic income city quarters, at which point state provided housing seem a better alternative to prevent basic-slums.

and there's a question about what the long term goal of the society are - given that there will always be premium goods/service out of reach of people living off basic income, I'd wager that while basic income is sure helpful to bring people out of poverty and placing them into the same bucket of the working class, it rarely help bringing such people into middle class, as that would require the saving necessary to bootstrap a private action, which I rarely hear to be the goal of basic income.

But I worked with plenty of people in retail and food service who were older and had families to support and mortgages to pay. They didn't have the luxury of putting their self-respect above their paycheck.

It's ironic to think that people put up with that level of abuse for 8 or 10 or $12 an hour. Now that I'm an engineer, he would be unthinkable for anybody to talk to me like that, but in food service I experienced it from both customers and managers on the daily.

If the only way anybody can stand working someplace is if they're so desperate that they can't afford to leave, that's a job that shouldn't exist.

You have no personal experience with UBI schemes, yet you think you know what people would do based on what you think you would do. A long time ago people thought that heavier objects fell faster than lighter ones. Then Galileo came along, conducted an experiment, and proved them wrong. It seems something similar is going on here. Peoples intuitions about UBI and joblessness are faulty and researchers are disproving them.

In the Nordics, there are no manual car washes, yet life goes on. Economically it doesn't make sense because of the high labor costs, and realistically it is a menial job that can be for the most part automated.

If you want to live in a world where you can have a cheap hand wash in your back yard, then you have to also admit to wanting structural inequalities to keep people trapped in those carwash jobs. It's delusional to believe that the people washing your car have a path out through hard work alone; my observation is that they already work pretty hard.

UBI is much more about giving workers power than giving them free money. And yes, there will be dole bludgers. Unfortunately any system is going to have inefficiencies, you just have to pick which ones and live with it. Alternatively, you can get tough on crime and house a prison population.

>> ‘It’s sometimes said that people will sit around doing nothing if you give them free money.’

this never make sense unless people have different definition of UBI. You will need to work to borderline enjoy life.

And it also shift the power to workers. No more shitty jobs like what you describe just to put food on table. The level of abuse people will tolerate before they quit will reduce. It will fundamentally shift ( or lift ) the power in bottom half of the society.

But no work on UBI have ever provided a solution how they deal with "living". If I have a small flat of 6m2 ( unless you want to live in a cage like Hong Kong, I think 6m2 per person is bad enough to be the absolute minimum ) , enough for a bed and bathroom, and zero rent. Getting yourself fed is easy enough.

Which shift the question from UBI to something else, our biggest problem isn't UBI, but property. How it is both an investment as an asset as well as a fundamental need by human. You could always pop up the property prices so UBI will never be enough. And every time we have a discussion about UBI, it is always about tax, equality, willingness to work and nothing on actual "living".

So... to pay for a private apartment maybe that crap retail job would be ok.

One of the silver linings for me of the pandemic is how much the Great Resignation is revealing to the general public how much "essential workers" were poorly paid and miserable. Not even in a way that was necessitated by the work itself, but just because their bosses could get away with being jerks.

If you think that people who are sitting at the bottom wouldn't take a job to ensure that their basic needs are met and they can have something nice for themselves every once in a while, then I don't know what to tell you. People didn't just start working degrading jobs in the 2010s.

This is basically Plato's Republic 101.

Perhaps jobs are scarce and this worker really has no place to go and must endure the abuse. Once BI is introduced, what percent of workers would quit and stop working, vs. quit but find new employment using the BI to bridge expenses in the meantime and be able to make a full time effort of the search?

BI should make employees more mobile and employers with unpleasant work will need to pay more to get those positions filled.

This feels like a particularly unfair anecdote in the context of what we're talking about. Imagine for a second that the tables were turned and your spouse was disabled and unable to work: Everything is harder – they can't leave the house without someone to give them a ride; maybe they have to use a wheelchair, which makes everything twice as difficult. They're in survival mode every day.

Not only do they rely on the state for money to eat, to pay rent, to keep the lights on, but doing anything enjoyable is challenging. They have to navigate a byzantine system that is DESIGNED to make qualifying for support extremely frustrating, and then have to stay on top of getting their benefits regularly. The system has literally trained them to react to any issue with anger because they know that whenever a problem occurs, it could be weeks or months until they get the money they need to survive.

I'm not saying that your spouse's experience was justified in any way – dealing with that requires a hell of a lot more than minimum wage! – but (theoretically) this particular problem would go away with something like basic income, where most of these people would have their basic costs covered. They might still have "disability" to help pay for all the other stuff disabled people have to deal with, but at least they aren't relying on a sclerotic bureaucracy to eat, yunno?

One reason retail workers passively endure being berated by customers is that they are fearful of losing their job. UBI would reduce that fear and increase worker power.

I'm neither arguing for nor against UBI here, but from my understanding, you description is not of UBI. Here you are saying income as a substitute for work. Where as UBI as I understand it is provided independent of work. Meaning that by your spouse quitting she would be losing half of her income.

Maybe she still makes that trade off and quits and the program needs to raise wages to keep people. Or maybe she stays in place for the pay (with abuse). Or maybe the programs doesn't raise wages and has worse/fewer employees as a result.

But it doesn't sounds like the situation you describe is UBI.

Probably the same people who said that increasing the money supply wouldn't cause inflation because MMT or some other tendentious garbage.

I totally agree with you on re: inflation, though. Some organization, presumably government, will need to manage any UBI implementation, and government is nothing if not an inefficient allocator of its resources. I worry any broad national UBI system will just raise inflation to absorb the prices, while increases tax on the entire population, and losing a non-trivial percentage of that increase in the transfer.

The two big ifs are: would UBI be the same cost as current welfare programs, and can we actually get rid of current welfare if we roll out UBI? There is a tremendous amount of overhead involved in current welfare programs, so it's not unreasonable that the first question is could be resolved. Politically, the second issue seems unlikely to be implemented.

Isn't that a good outcome? Humans get more leisure time.

That might be true but it also might not be true. If you add a bunch of rules to the program it can increase the administrative cost a lot and leave you with less money to distribute. I'm not sure if it's true, but when I was a kid I heard that Canada's baby bonus (Canada Child Benefit) was made universal because of this.

A - so prices of $40,000 cars have increased becauae people got $2000 or whatever for free? What is that as percentage of wages, 0.5%

How about this massive supply chain and manufacturing disruption, could that somehow be responsible?

B - the wealthy and corporations were getting money for free for 20 years, it's called quanittative easing, and it caused massive inflation of asset prices

> "pain Y for product Z, this does not change if you rescale the meaning of money."

Usually economic theories talk about productivity, resources and velocity of money. This stuff about pain sounds like it came out of a sadistic religious cult.

The phrasing tries to downplay the number, but 1 in 8 people stopping work is very significant.

> And the current inflation (and previous events where govts gave out decent sums of cash to help short term other econ issues) shows what happens when people get money for free - prices rise to absorb it. The reason being if person X is willing to put in pain Y for product Z, this does not change if you rescale the meaning of money.

Yes: If you give everyone extra money and theoretically nobody quits working, it's hard to argue that the extra money wouldn't just go to rising prices.

We're already seeing this with supply-constrained resources like housing: In hot cities, people will pay whatever they have to in order to outbid their competitors for houses or apartments. Pouring more money into the situation would only make the numbers go up, but the root problem still exists.

"However, the only two groups who worked significantly less were new mothers, and teenagers working to support their families. New mothers spent this time with their infant children, and working teenagers put significant additional time into their schooling"

Note that 13% is likely the net value, so if this group slowed down, possibly other groups actually started working harder at the same time, compensating for some of the loss.

I suspect the extra support may translate to decreased profits for landowners. Tenants would have more time and money to file maintenance issues and represent themselves in the legal system, which would cost landowners. In Ontario it costs $50 and takes a lot of time and energy to file a complaint to the LTB. Tenants would also have more ability to change their situation in response to abuse, shop around for a better deal on housing, etc.

One of my favourites is to encourage cooperative housing and to have the government become a landlord itself, but with rents capped to a share of income. This way, the government would have an incentive to make the system more efficient and to make more and better public housing, as the money would go back to the government budget and they would be able to lower taxes as a result. At the same time, the private housing market will have to compete. The idea of allowing the government to make a reasonable profit as measured by outcomes to the consumer is very successful for many endeavors, and it makes it very unpopular to cut public services as it would necessitate a tax increase. We have done this in Quebec with Hydro-Quebec and, unlike many crown corporations, it has resisted privatization, while still providing the best prices to the consumer in the world for electricity, without any subsidies (as it generates net profit for the government), and many very good jobs.

Beyond this, it has caused cascading positive externalities not only in Quebec but throughout the world - as it has pioneered mass production techniques of LiFePO4 battery technology that is now becoming dominant for EVs, greatly improved brushless hub motor technology which is now used in many low-cost EVs, and facilitated the construction of renewable energy projects.

This however requires a large change in ideology, as current neoliberal and neoconservative dominant ideologies not only refuse to admit the fact that the government can provide a better overall service than the free market, but are deathly afraid of allowing state owned enterprises to compete with private businesses as a matter of principle. This limits the scope of solutions to many problems.

Even stimulus checks that were small and arrived irregularly had a huge impact on hunger in America. $1000/mo on the regular would be revolutionary.

In a balanced UBI, the UBI is paid for with taxes. So if you make the average income, you get $X from UBI and your taxes go up by $X. If you make more than average, like your example, then you pay out more than you receive in UBI.

Because average income is considerably higher than median income, most people benefit from UBI.

Sum up the number of people who died, were injured, retired, our found better work, and it had a much greater effect than the government payouts. Otherwise, these problems would have already largely resolved already. Those extra payments are gone.

There is a qualitative difference between needing to spend 40+ hours a week to sustain yourself versus spending 0 hours. If one need to spend those hours anyways it makes sense to maximize the income from doing so.

It may take a generation, but I think most people would eventually come to the conclusion that the rat race isn't worth it when zero hours is an option.

I think many are quick to conclude motivation is the cause without considering any less visible underlying reasons that cause people to be in those situations.

I'm looking for a job and every time I apply to a job, I have a little voice in my head saying : are you sure you want to work there ? You currently have the opportunity to do what you want and learn whatever you want for free, but if you work there it will be boring af and you will not be able to do what you want.

So currently I'm reading a lot of books, doing coursera course I'm interested in and doing a lot of sport which is impossible when I have a job because reading takes hours just to read one book.

This article says UBI has been controversial for a long time in Denmark but is on the political agenda again recently:

https://basisindkomst.dk/basic-income-borgerloen-in-denmark-...

Often the way that welfare is implemented is that if you can't work, you get welfare. This seems like a really obvious, logical, good idea. But there's a trap (a welfare trap!). Because on the other side, when you start working again, you stop getting welfare. And your net income might actually go down.

A rational actor might therefore end up stuck in this local optimum where they stay on welfare and never start working.

One argument for UBI is that it eliminates the drop in income associated with the return to work (because you get it unconditionally: whether you are working or not) . A theoretical prediction might therefore be that more people would work if UBI is available.

In practical tests so far this doesn't seem to have quite panned out. This is due to UBI having multiple effects simultaneously. However, I would be most amused to see if in some situations this does became the dominant effect, and the number of working people went up.

If I guessed correct, then the Danish is significantly different from UBI, because that system discourages working. Starting work means losing your welfare. Or at best every euro you earn from working is subtracted from your welfare. Besides that, in such systems you need a complicated bureaucracy to figure out who should and should not get welfare. This bureaucracy needs to contend with fraud, and is probably rewarded for giving as few people welfare as possible. This leads to a bureaucracy that is somewhat hostile to those it is meant to serve.

With Universal basic income, you lose the discouragement to work. You lose the very complicated and hostile bureaucracy (with exceptions for emigrants and immigrants probably). And you lose some of the political pressure to cut welfare, because everyone gets UBI so there is less jealousy.

In the Netherlands there have been cases of people on welfare needing to pay back thousands of euros because sometimes their mother did groceries for them. That was officially 'income' they failed to declare, and therefore their welfare was retroactively cut. That is just inhumane, and stupid. It means anyone on welfare who cannot make ends meet cannot ask anyone for financial help, because that would cost them their welfare.

We had guys working for $18 quickly so the math and figure out they would make $24 an hour not working. And they did. Our CFO took covid very seriously and laid them off or did whatever we had to do do they could take advantage of this.

We’re still having trouble getting people to fill those positions now even that the rates are back to normal.

Three guys I know of all started working construction and were being paid cash under the table. So making the $24 plus the cash, and are still doing that. So… I’m not sure about this whole thing.

What about losing a friend? Learning who you are in relation to your parents? Attempting to cooperate with a partner? Sacrificing your goals for your children?

Life is much richer than the lessons learned by doing menial labor.

Without a strong incentive for reciprocation we are solving half of the problem, while ignoring the negative consequences.

In a way it’s similar to how large mental institutions were closed in the US (the idea that had some merits), and now just ignore people with severe mental problems until they either injure themselves or someone else.

some of these are lesson we can maybe stop teaching.

It takes a relatively small slice of a billionaire's power to destabilize national leadership, a process that I assume isn't just happening in the US butt around the world. This doesn't even include the fact that Facebook is a near-optimal propaganda tool in protecting the wealth of the people who rule over changes to the way it runs.

How many people have quit working as soon as they are able?

It is essentially the same question and the answer appears to be quite a few, with a few odd people who are unable to do nothing.

Maybe all these people don't want to work these kinda of jobs and are moving into other sectors.

Maybe working conditions and pay need to be drastically improved in those jobs.

Nope we haven't. We just paid attention to the facts:

Some states turned down additional unemployment benefits. Those states continued to have same employment issues as the states that maintained benefits.

So clearly the issue was not the unemployment benefits.