Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by greenchair | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

greenchair

maybe because every time UBI is tried it fails?

View on HN

Can you provide any links that show that every time it’s tried, it fails?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots

Skimming this list, there seems to be one really marked failure, in Finland, but that’s disputed I read also.

Can you list more failures?

This link says very explicitly that it did show people were discouraged from working, making the experiment obviously a failure.

> Among all the people, only two key groups were found to be discouraged from working by the Mincome project – new mothers and teenaged boys, who, instead of entering the workforce at an early age, decided to study until grade 12, increasing the proportion of students who graduate high school.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but neither of those outcomes sound like failures? They sound like a net positive for society. New mothers get to spend more time with their children, which has a ton of societal benefits, and teenaged boys decided to study more, and become more educated, something that also helps society out a lot. I admittedly didn't read the entire link yet, but both of those sound to me like a positive outcome of UBI, or at least neutral.

It sounds like you understood. I find the disconnect between the summary above and the quote below really funny. Almost as funny as explaining the joke here!

Really, many jokes of this nature have to be signalled out-of-band somehow due to Poe's law (particularly applicable in this case). I wouldn't be surprised if a non-negligible number of users here actually held this view (due to a variety of reasons and justifications perhaps, but nevertheless still possessing such a perspective).

you will need to provide evidence for that assertion

It has never been tried.

Remind us what the U stands for?

Then it will never happen regardless, let alone the fact that any attempts to do as such will collapse before reaching "universal" status

When? Where?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com