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Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

In the US, we gave money to people during the pandemic. Worker shortages in low-skill labor resulted and inflation hit 10%. I think that's the major flaw - young, childless people without responsibility see no reason to work, when they can watch Netflix all day, either paying their mom some token rent or sharing a flop house with a bunch of friends.

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> Fears that the experiment would engender laziness in participants were not borne out in the project’s findings: “The ‘laziness’ contention is just not supported by our findings,” the chief data analyst of one of the experiments said. “There is not anywhere near the mass defection the prophets of doom predicted.”

We already did the experiment, across the whole country!

Yeah, and correlation isn't causality. Causal studies under controlled conditions don't back up what you're saying.

why are the results of a study with a limited reach preferable to the results of an actual universal real world event?

There is no control available; we don't have a second population of people who did go through the beginning of the COVID pandemic, 2020 political environment, and so forth, but did not receive the stimulus package.

I suggest looking into some basic experimental design texts if you're interested in why this is so important!

You can't possibly tease out all the different causes of the effect you're discussing here. Are you sure the worker shortages weren't due to the inflation? Much of that was greedflation, where companies raised prices due to the crisis and then kept them high, but wages didn't go up, so some people - especially those with long commutes - were actually working at a loss.

Not to mention that the amount given - a total of $3200 to childless people over an entire year - amounts to around 3 months of an average 1 bedroom apartment's rent in America in 2020, much less in cities, and not including groceries or utilities. As a young, childless person who got the full amount that year, it gave me exactly what I needed to be able to move out, but certainly wouldn't have sustained me - even in a "flop house" - long enough to really avoid looking for work.

In the US, we gave money to people during the pandemic.

We increased unemployment benefits to the point where for many people it was more than their previous income. Of course people weren't going to be excited to effectively lose money by taking a job. That's not at all a UBI which pays whether or not you're working.

Previously it was “welfare queens”. Apparently now it’s “Netflix slackers”?

"young, childless people without responsibility see no reason to work" doesn't seem supported by data. If their workplaces shut down where are they supposed to work?

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