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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

> are turned into just a cost which never produces anything.

The whole premise here is incorrect. Every time UBI is tried, this scenario does not happen. You can find study after study that finds the same thing. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/19/21112570/univer...

> Economists found that it doesn’t make them work less. It does lead to improved education and mental health, and decreased addiction and crime.

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Most of the schemes listed on that page fall short of what I consider to be UBI. In particular, most fail to provide enough money for someone to fund their basic needs (food and shelter).

Are you aware of any UBI experiments where the recipients are confident that both:

1) the amount will cover their basic needs, and

2) the scheme will last forever?

The reason I'm asking is that if either of these conditions were not met, the recipient would be crazy to stop working.

If someone were to commit to giving you $10k/month forever, increasing with inflation, you might quit your job. If it were only $500/month, you'd probably keep working. If it were $10k/month, but the payments might stop after a year, you'd probably keep working.

(Not 'you' specifically of course. I know nothing of your personal situation.)

You seem to be assuming that UBI qualitative effects are scale invariant for both population and time. Why do you assume that?

There is a tendency among many people to give precedence to a scientific study over pure reasoning even when the degree of relevance of the scientific study is tiny. It’s like schools don’t teach how to determine if a study is applicable and so people often do it very clumsily. This is a dangerous error.

Because the same potential issue has been rised every time. And every experiment on a scale bigger than before shows the problem doesn't happen. I wish more people were saying "let's keep scaling the experiments up to see where it stops working" rather than repeating that it won't.

I'm not saying I'm 100% certain it is invariant. Just that we should stop repeating the tropes that so far haven't been shown true.

What potential risks of UBI do you think the existing studies rule out?

I think pro UBI people often straw man anti UBI arguments as a disguised belief that Group X is lazy. I think pro UBI people do this because they are morally triggered by discriminatory work ethic beliefs (fair enough). I think that people who cite these studies might see the studies as ruling out the straw man, which makes them feel fuzzy self righteous feelings, but to me the studies do not even remotely address what I see as the actual risks of at scale UBI deployment.

It's simply: So far almost every experiment I've seen had positive outcomes in terms of employment, physical and mental health, overall happiness / stress reduction. That means we should keep expanding this until either we find actual problems to deal with or everyone is on UBI. We can spend ages trying to come up with various risks to rule out, but... what's the point in practice? We're basically agreed that we don't really 100% know how people will behave at scale. Worst case, we can discover and deal with real problems. Best case, it works great at scale as it does in small tests.

Unfortunately you can’t apply your Agile methodologies to UBI. I want to know about every possible tax edge case funding it because inevitably the upper class will find ways around paying for UBI. You don’t want it to become like Social Security where there is risk of insolvency in future generations.

The risks of UBI don't exist at the level of the individual. They exist at the system level. Studying individual level effects does not tell us anything about system level effects.

That's not the sense I meant it in. Yes, people will of course not be idle while they get the UBI, but they are no longer likely to be these integrated cogs in a machine.

If you work in a team programming something or similar, then you are co-operating to produce a product, and if you've got a civilised company you'll all end up friends. You've had a common goal and you've worked towards it together in an honest way. Furthermore, you are necessary to society. Even if the political and economic elite are not in on this work, and are not participating in it in an honest way, the success of your work is something they need, thus they need you.

But here the reason why we're instituting UBI is that people are no longer necessary to production.

This is similar to something about the resource curse. When countries need their workers for wealth they tend to need to ensure that their workers have good conditions, but if they can get away with just extracting oil or natural resources, then the good conditions disappear. AI will reduce the need for workers to the point of UBI, so it will become more like the extractive work in these states with less good conditions.

So my objection isn't to UBI as such, it's that I think UBI doesn't go far enough. Having thought some more since yesterday evening I think it may even be so that for the situation to be stable the people on UBI need to basically rule the country full-time. A mega-parliament with very great power. So as society moves away from work ordinary people need to move away from work and towards ruling.

They have never tried on a large scale over a large timeline. Behavior changes will not happen over night.

You mean like the one across Iran running from 2011? Yeah, I agree at this point we should just run it globally for over a decade to see if the result is in any way different than almost every single test done so far.

Not only that, but behaviour change depends on whether you expect the thing to last forever.

"This paper has two purposes. First, it documents the historical context of MINCOME, a Canadian guaranteed annual income field experiment (1974 to 1979). Second, it uses routinely collected health administration data and a quasi experimental design to document an 8.5 percent reduction in the hospitalization rate for participants relative to controls, particularly for accidents and injuries and mental health. We also found that participant contacts with physicians declined, especially for mental health, and that more adolescents continued into grade 12. We found no increase in fertility, family dissolution rates, or improved birth out comes. We conclude that a relatively modest GAI can improve population health, suggesting significant health system savings"

https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/cpp.37.3.283

All in about 4 years.

As an aside, linking to vox.com as proof of some claim doesn't really help your cause. If you want people to take you seriously try to at least cite data from a source that isn't one of the most biased and tarnished major media organizations in the country.

It's enough to do minimal search to find the referenced programs. If anyone's actually interested in how UBI experiments worked so far, they don't need spoonfeeding.

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