Universal basic income: German experiment bring surprising results
ctvnews.ca
ctvnews.ca
That study has shown exactly nothing. Of course I'm not going to quit if I'm out of job and UBI after three years.
Considering that the group on UBI was also happier, felt more financially secure and freer than the control group, this is hardly surprising.
It was a great time, but it tought me that people get lazy if they don't have to work. So now I am obviously projecting my own lazyness to the general population, which is why I am against UBI.
(I live in Spain, not Germany)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/04/microsoft-excel-...
Not even that sometimes. Like the US attempting to re-ordering the world trade system by imposing massive tariffs. They did this even though both economic theory and empirical evidence (previous historical attempts at doing this), showed it would be disastrous.
What I think could be a very interesting on-ramp to something more UBIesque, in an environment with lots of need-based social support payments like Germany, would be an opt-in flat taxation mode for earning on the side of receiving aid: taxed high starting with the first cent earned, and in exchange those earnings are explicitly excluded from and need-based considerations or thresholds. That could greatly reduce all "not worth the hassle" considerations and uncertainties. It could be implemented as a special bank account where every incoming transaction is automatically taxed, and every payment or withdrawal certified "I'm allowed to have this without putting anything need-based in question.
What tax rate? The logical first candidate would be wherever the income tax curve tops out for high earners. If that's the highest those can be bothered with before they "stop performing", you should not be surprised if low earners would not want to perform at a higher effective tax rate either. But that tax rate should not be so low that a shift to regular taxation makes no sense in cases sufficiently permanent and wellhpaying that the administrative change isn't just overhead.
Those making $7/hour are often working two jobs, UBI would allow them to quit one of them.
Oh and if you own a house $1500/month is easy to live off. You can probably have a car for that.
This is a more general problem with UBI of course, they all depend on a global desire for every single individual to contribute to society. And here I am, I don't think more than 10% or so of people feel that need. Of course 50% just outright can't, due to being too young or too old.
And assuming you're figures are correct that would already drop $1500 to $750, which wouldn't cover rent at all.
The $1500 was after taxes. If it wasn't, the average person would end up paying more in taxes than they receive in UBI. The goal was to net the average person to $0.
And the results generally bear little resemblance to either (1) or (2).
Napoleon supposedly said "the moral is to the physical as three to one" in reference to the battlefield performance of military units. But the same is true across extremely wide ranges of human behaviors.
Superficially, yeah. I'd read that situation as a combination of (1) "millions of clicks from wanna-feel-happy lefties pay the bills" journalism, and (2) editors wanting "friends" in the "so rich I can afford to be a blinkered ideologue" progressive set.
For those inclined to real-world public policy, the main result I see is that the complex "needs testing" part of existing entitlement and welfare programs is 99% ideological/political bullshit and bureaucratic make-work.
Although I have a masters degree I worked for 10 years, 3 nights each week, as a volunteer psychotherapist, providing free therapy to those that could least afford psychotherapy, those that needed it most.
I obviously had a day job too. I loved working for free, the benefits are huge, less stress and autonomy in how you choose to spend your time and skills and a greater sense of achievement.
If I had CBI I would work for free.
I am all for social devotional work backed with CBI.
CBI and work for free if you want to.
I can definitetely understand the sense of feeling more mentally stable without the daily stresses that come with not enough money to live on.
Most people who earn a decent salary are generally against CBI because of their own values around their own working ethic. There is nothing written anywhere that says that work is beneficial to a human being.
The money for nothing crowd always raises its ugly head when talking about any support that benefits human development especially of the poor.
As a retired therapist the majority of my lower socio-economic clients problems where due in full to the finanacial situation they found themselves in.
All therapists carry a sense of helplessnes when dealing with such clients becaue we cannot help them.
I believe UBI would be a net benefit for society it would enable the poorest to survive better and the rest of us more flexibility in how we life our lives.
I'm not against UBI, I just don't see how it can be done. It seems fundamentally impossible to finance at scale, which all of these experiments ignore. They are always experiments where a tiny number of people get money generated by a vast majority of people.
Which we have already, in the form of needs-based welfare.
Surprising only to those who have not read literally any other study on UBI. They all come to this conclusion.
The only reason we don't have nice things like this: universal housing, healthcare, income, food security, is because a handful of dragons sit on and hoard unfathomably sized mountains of gold and convince the uneducated and those ignorant of economics and politics that the real problem is average people getting what they deserve - A dignified life where their basic needs are met and they have the dignified freedom to pursue a fulfilling life rather than spend it enriching aforementioned dragons for exploitative wages.
Your assertion about tax planning misses that proper UBI implementation would include tax reform to ensure the wealthy can't avoid contributing. If anything it demonstrates your clear understanding of whom would actually be taxed to achieve the funding for such social programs. The dragons.
More importantly, the data shows UBI recipients spent money locally on necessities and small businesses, not funneling it to large corporations. The 'indirect subsidy' theory contradicts spending patterns observed in UBI trials.
If only there was a metaphor to explain that. Maybe something about a mythical creature, hoarding piles of treasure.
The 200 billion that Bezos is assumed to be "worth" is currently in the hands of the people, being used by us. If we wanted to fix society instead of buying amazon shares we could do it today. Bezos hasn't "hoarded" it, we have it.
"To the dismay of Thorin, Smaug the horrible turned out to sit on a pile of paper that anyone could buy if they wanted to and all the gold was already in circulation in the town of Bree."
To be frank, this whole “the economy is not a zero-sum game” argument is kind of a meme at this point.
In this context, what seems missing is the Ecclesiastes realization that 'fulfilling' (for some) is always going to mean becoming a dragon.
That is, the purported us/them separation between 'we' and 'dragons' is a mirage--there is only the full spectrum or humanity in view.
One example of a dragon was Saddam Hussein, who characterized oppression of the marsh Arabs as "being firm".
So it goes. One possible exit from the cycle is the realization the 'fulfilling' is not necessarily measured in materialistic units.
It's not that, dragons hoarding mountains of gold has always historically been an allegory for the rich hoarding wealth.
>'fulfilling' (for some) is always going to mean becoming a dragon.
Luckily we have anti dragon tools, like progressive taxation, wealth taxes, and robust social programs to prevent the dragons from sitting on too much gold.
>One example of a dragon was Saddam Hussein, who characterized oppression of the marsh Arabs as "being firm". So it goes. One possible exit from the cycle is the realization the 'fulfilling' is not necessarily measured in materialistic units.
Yeah, the fulfillment is the downstream byproduct of not having to worry about the difficulty of meeting daily material needs, not the justification for the policy itself.
1. If you think that a Bezos, or a Buffet, or a Musk, is paying a "fair" amount, then fine. Your faith in mortal systems stands rewarded.
2. This is less a question of basic needs--look at how fat and unhealthy so many are today--and perhaps more a question of envy. Do I really think that joy is a function of loot? Is more stuff the answer to our existential questions?
Sorry, I guess I should've been clearer and added Properly implemented anti dragon tools. I assumed that was self evident. I suspect it is, given you clearly are capable of recognizing the problematic dragons I allude to.
>2.
No, it's definitely a question of basic needs. I exclusively mentioned income, healthcare, housing, food security as the policy objectives, and not cheap consumable goods/treats. There's a wealth of evidence that a society that provides guarantees around those basic needs has way fewer issues downstream. For a start, look to the healthcare outcomes in countries that have universal healthcare vs the US.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as they say.
I'm totally in agreement, in the abstract. It would take a sick mind to enjoy observing poverty/starvation.
The details of how a sustainable economy that affords all the opportunity to thrive is provided is still non-trivial.
The Five Year Plans of the Soviet Union, to drop a specific example, were full of great ideas, but the society was corrupt and everyone lied about the reality, until the lies collapsed at the three-quarter-century mark.
It says a lot about how much the ideology that "rich people deserving, poor people are lazy" has affected people's attitudes.
This is simply not true. Barring pathologies like dictatorships, Billionaires ("Dragons") are generally not hoarding anything that affects anyone. Their fortunes are not "mountains of gold", but an estimate of how much value they could theoretically get from the rest of society if they sold their company.
It's not money that is "kept away" from the rest of us, in any way at all. We already have it. And if we don't, neither does the Dragon.
A wealthy society will create more billionaires ("Dragons") than a poor one, and a wealthy society also has more hospitals and food to share with the unfortunate than a poor society does.
Bezos, Gates etc are not hoarding hospitals, cheese or apartments. They cause more hospitals, cheese and apartments to exist since their companies employ people that need and can pay for all those things.
Even China has realized this by now. Hundreds of millions of people in China have had immense increase in standard of living the past few decades, while a few hundred billionaires have appeared.
Nobody has figured out how you get one without the other.
That's because this is not basic income but just an additional, lucky source of income, for a limited time. It's effectively landing a contract job on top of a regular job. I'm gonna go to great lengths to keep both since I can save the additional money and they might have quite an impact on my life.
I'm guessing the target people were not the best paid workers in Germany but still, saving €1200 per month is a lot more than the average of €450 ("According to a survey conducted in 2020 in Germany, the average monthly savings among the population amounted to 451 euros."). So if they were an average family that had a job and saved €450, with the "UBI" they just managet to triple their savings over a period of three years! Of course people won't quit their jobs, they're not stupid.
Overall it shows absolutely nothing on UBI but maybe it shows something on human psychology and rational behavior.
One effect it might have, is that employers need to go above and beyond to keep their workers happy. So, so many people have a job which they at the very best tolerate, but would quit on the spot - if they had the economic means to do so.
Some of those jobs are quite critical for society. Just think about healthcare...plenty of people enter healthcare with high morale and a desire to help, but find them completely disillusioned due to overwork, shitty shifts, unappreciation, mediocre pay, and what have you. If half of healthcare workers quit on the spot, that would lead to a societal crisis. But maybe it would also force the employers to fundamentally change the space, in order to not lose their employees.
I also think UBI would give people a "second chance". Lots of people enter the workforce before they know what they want to do, and find themselves lock into the profession or work - due to financial reasons.
In a capitalist society, wages would rise and conditions will improve as people are willing to pay as much as needed for health care.
The problem is that in the current rent-seeking economy (capital gets all the money while work is worth very little) all that money is redirected to the owners of middleman companies that add nothing to the economy. Produce no services nor products. Our current system is very inefficient and cannot last as it is today.
To increase wages and improve the situation of most workers will assure increased productivity and citizens well-being. It is a no-brainer. But it is not easy to implement as the people in power profits handsomely with the current bad situation.
People also need food, which is a labor-intensive business, and it is one of the main drivers of human trafficking in the US: https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/human-trafficking-forced-l...
I've never seen any explanation for how it's going to be financed that passes even the most rudimentary fact check. There is not enough existing money to pay for it, and if we create new money it will lose value.
As long as necessities are valuable, meaning people actually have to work to make them, we can't pretend that they're worthless by covering their costs with a UBI. I see no way around that.
Before we reach the stage where necessities are free, UBI seems to result in taking thousands from people in need in order to give twenties to everyone including FAANG-programmers and lawyers.
I'd rather see the ones in need get thousands and actually survive.
The "surprising results" are so surprising to me because I talk to people in Germany and most people believe they pay too much taxes, specially young people. The difference is that middle class Germans are actually paying for the system. No free lunch there.
If robots take over human labor, you can always own robots(privately owning distributed means of production) instead of having a central planning system that never worked but interested people are hell bent designing so they benefit.
100% this. The average worker pays too much indeed. Mega-corporations and the super-rich do not pay anymore their share. It is a shame.
That is wrong. Employers pay a small fraction of taxes per each one of their employees.
I think that there is a big problem with education and the tax system. When people thinks that the "employer part of the salary tax" is 50% of the employee tax we are failing to provide education to our own citizens. And I think that HN readers are more informed that the average person.
But this is by design. Misinformed citizens have a more difficult time realizing how much money big corporations and the rich are stealing.
Now, I've searched for the actual contributions, and indeed the actual income tax is not covered by the employer at all. The only parts of the full levied amount that are shared 50% are: pension, unemployment, health and long-term care insurance, (plus some other things that the employee doesn't have to pay).
So in the end it's about 1/3 (or under that based on tax class) of the total levied amount that gets covered by the employer. (PS. All of this for Germany, cribbed from one of those tax calculator websites)
From that point of view, getting "free money" (which in effect may mean for example getting someone else to deliver food to you without you working) is not much different from all kinds of other rent-seeking behaviors.
The scary bit is that this seems not to be immediately obvious to many people.
122 people for 3 years seems worse than useless, worse in that it probably makes people think this isn't statistically useless.
Drug trials often include can go to several thousand but only in a later stage, earlier stages are a few hundred. https://www.fda.gov/patients/drug-development-process/step-3...
Seems like the article undermines its own headline.
Come talk to me