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Comment by DemocracyFTW2 | Hacker News Reader

> The problem with welfare today is that its a disincentive to work

No. The reason you say that is because you're young and you believe what you've heard. You will soon cease to be the former and then presumably, likely, stop to do the latter. People want to work, they want to be useful. And yes, if I support you but threaten to stop supporting you as soon as you get to work for money—suddenly working for money looks less attractive. Sure, natural. There's nothing wrong with that. But if I support you no matter whether you add money to that yourself, then that is not detrimental to your willingness to work, it just gives you that much more leeway to choose a suitable occupation.

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You haven't met enough deadbeats in your life. Trust me, there's a virtually limitless number of them, and they very much do not want to work.

You need to provide hard numbers because welfare fraud is typically less than single digits. Going by “vibes” is pretty useless, especially since the government has been the largest force in reducing poverty in western nations.

The problem with this is that there's little way to get any realistic data here. Of course the number of people polled that say they're a deadbeat will be low.

And so what? I'm ok subsidising 100 deadbeats scraping by if I can score a couple performers with stellar ROI.

This is YCombinator's blog after all, isn't it?

The only reason I work is because I have to. I hate nothing more than the daily bullshit meetings and sprint reviews and all that other useless life-sucking crap. And I have it good, most people don't have the privilege of complaining from an AC'd home office while they tap away at a keyboard.

No, most people work because that's the only way they get food on the table and survive, not because of some hilariously out of touch notion of menial work being fulfilling

If that's your perspective it's easy to assume that it's the same for most people, but really reality is probably more gray. Outside of some genuinely horrible low class (paying) jobs when you talk to other people you will almost always find that there's always things they love and things they hate about their jobs, and they just sit on a spectrum. If you're really so disenfranchised from your job as to truly hate everything you do about it, what's stopping you from changing it? Like you mentioned, you have a previliegeld position you could find another far less corporate more immediate reward job that would make you happier at work. Or if you just accepted a worse fitting job for better pay, then it's not really your job's fault, you decided to sacrifice work happiness for other wealth, status or personal related happiness.

Working on your own projects is also work. There's no reason why the term work should refer exclusively to working for an employer.

Agreed and what you say is true for many, if not most workers. I think this brings up something we're all a bit reluctant to add to this conversation about UBI: the reason to do it at all.

As practiced, capitalism is just high stakes musical chairs. Everyone, rich and poor, works fervently to ensure they aren't the last ones standing with no chair. UBI asks: what if everyone always has a chair?

Its a very unsettling question, one can almost hear the record scratch when its posed. So unsettling, we start asking who deserves a chair!

And suddenly we're not talking about capitalism OR UBI at all. This is something else entirely: class. The allegedly unwashed lazy hordes versus the Ultra Clean Society of the Diamond Shower Faucets.

The primary incentive for anyone to work (as we understand the term today), is to maintain food and shelter above all else. That's it. Proponents of UBI want everyone to have food and shelter, be less of a slave. Opponents worry about whether we can afford to give everyone a chair.

> if I support you but threaten to stop supporting you as soon as you get to work for money—suddenly working for money looks less attractive

So you agree that "the problem with welfare today is that its a disincentive to work"?

No, that's not "the problem". Framing dissatisfaction with existing solutions as if there is a singular problem is not constructive.

It's probably worse as a disincentive to marriage than as a disincentive to work.

How do you know how old he is?

People say it because they experience similar cliffs in the tax system even with higher incomes.

I live in the UK. Currently my marginal tax rate is something like 65% because for every £100 I earn, I pay 40% income tax, 12% national insurance, 9% student loan (which functions more like a tax here than a real loan), and I lose something called child benefit when I earn more.

So yeah, I want to earn more, but it's pretty marginal returns for the extra work, stress and responsibility until I've totally lost child benefit (lost totally at £80k) and then I start to keep more of the income again. And then at £100k you lose the government support for childcare, you start having to pay interest on all savings accounts, and so between £100k and £120k you can be worse off than before rather than better off, especially if you have multiple children.

That's not to say that the incentives are the same on the low end of the salary scale but you can see why people might think it.

The entire tax regime in the UK is outright designed to inhibit class mobility and penalise hard work. The 60% tax trap and other benefit cliffs over 100k are just punishing. At the same time the capitalist class enjoy a cool 20% haircut on capital returns.

i mean this study clearly shows that people work fewer hours and increase leisure time when given money.

i don’t think that is a bad thing necessarily but i think we can be relatively confident of the empirical reality of the effect (at least in the short-term) for quantities of money like this?

It shows they work 1.5 hours less per week. That’s one day off every six weeks, and I’d frankly bet that’s going to taking care of all the other uncompensated labor a person must do to survive. I don’t think I’d draw a lot of conclusions about people’s preference for work from a ~4% reduction in working hours following a roughly 20% increase in income.

> I’d frankly bet that’s going to taking care of all the other uncompensated labor a person must do to survive

Good thing they had the participants complete a time journal so we can see that it mostly went towards leisure time and socializing. Again, I'm not making a moral judgement here - for a similar amount of money relative to my salary I would also shift towards more leisure at the margin.

> I don’t think I’d draw a lot of conclusions

The point of the experiment is precisely so we can draw generalizable conclusions about how money around this quantity impacts people's behaviors/incentives. Many welfare programs offer similar quantities of saving.

I think your reasoning is a bit motivated - this is a pretty good social science experiment that was very careful to preregister their analysis.

> I think your reasoning is a bit motivated - this is a pretty good social science experiment that was very careful to preregister their analysis.

I’ll cop to that, but there are a lot of people commenting here who seem to be latching on to the relatively small decrease in working hours as a primary takeaway, and I’ve seen enough motivated reasoning around this topic elsewhere to have a theory on why they’re doing so.

And, for what it’s worth, I’m not trying to critique the study itself or the conditions it was performed under.

Are we measuring work by time?

If you code for 100 hours a week, and I code for 40 hours a week, who's working more? We care about the productivity, not the hours worked.

That's a rather smarmy response for someone who clearly lacks reading comprehension. I'd recommend:

(1) look up the definition of "disincentive". The parent didn't say anything about people not wanting to work or not wanting to be useful. And even then, you actually agreed about it being the disincentive ("if I support you but threaten to stop supporting you as soon as you get to work for money—suddenly working for money looks less attractive").

(2) understand the meaning of the phrase "The problem with X today is Y". It's very clearly not saying that Y is a problem with X, in fact, it's implying that there are other approaches to X that don't have problem Y.

?so?

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