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Comment by wozniacki | Hacker News Reader

  If a government were to do that for everyone it seems 
  pretty obvious that society will be better off - people 
  will spend their time working on things to improve 
  everyone's life rather than worrying about how to afford
  their rent

The incredulity of this is plainly galling.

How does one draw a broad conclusion like that?

Plenty of European examples abound where despite generous - some would argue very generous - state dispensed benefits certain sections of the society just do not respond positively in measures of improvement of their own station in life much less "working on things to improve everyone's else (lives)".

A good - and I admit quite controversial - account of this kind of malaise is recounted in the British Channel 4 documentary, Benefits Street [1] [2]

[1] Benefits Street Season 01 Episode 01

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlrLp-R4g_M

[2] Benefits Street

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

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The huge 'problem' with most European benefit systems that I am aware of that as soon as you take the money, your time is no longer your own. You cannot go to to school or take courses, start a company, do odd freelance work, do certain types of charity work, travel freely or a whole host of other potentially self improving things, without losing your benefits. Living on benefits is also living in constant fear that your benefits can be removed at any time for any (or no) reason. Remove all those barriers and requirements and remove the need to keep jumping through time consuming and seemingly arbitrary hoops to get your money and perhaps people will react differently.

Personally I come down on the skeptical side of the fence, but would really love to be proven wrong.

Also Benefit Street is not a documentary interested in facts, but reality TV at its finest, interested in entertaining, and should be judged as such.

> 'problem' with most European benefit systems that I am aware of that as soon as you take the money, your time is no longer your own.

Getting a job has similar disadvantages.

GP post was specifically about those lazy benefits claimants who don't study or do voluntary work to improve their chance of getting back to work.

Parent post correctly points out that many of those claimants were prohibited - under threat of criminal prosecution - from doing those things while claiming some benefit.

Often benefits put you in a situation where it makes no economical sense to pursue a job. I have a friend who lost her mother and had a pension that would be taken away if she got employed, but the pension itself was much bigger than she could ever dream of earning at that time (hell, it was bigger than I was earning in my first two programming jobs). So there's your incentive to go and get employed.

Or another example; until not so long ago, my mother (single parent) got social benefits that would disappear if my own personal income would exceed a particular (not very big) amount, and this would turn into a problem with paying rent and feeding her and my siblings. She also spent some time unemployed after a company she worked in went bust (the original owner died, and his son mismanaged it into the ground), because all jobs available for her wouldn't even pay enough to cover the lost benefits.

Basically, living at the lower end of income spectrum is incredibly hard, and you end up doing a lot of weird calculations. When working hard for 8+ hours a day pays you less than not working at all (and caring about your kids instead), suddenly this "laziness" becomes a perfectly rational choice.

Quite. I wouldn't call people "lazy" if they've fallen in a benefit trap. The benefits have been created with good intentions, but they have paved a road.

To be clear: I wasn't calling people claiming benefits lazy; I was saying that wozniacki was calling them lazy. I should have used scare quotes.

Clearly you didn't. Though wozniacki's message was phrased a in bit more nuanced way as well:

certain sections of the society just do not respond positively in measures of improvement of their own station in life -- I think we cannot escape the fact that this is true. Even in the wealthiest welfare states, there is poverty and unhappiness, but mostly it's not because of lack of (monetary) benefits, or access to education etc.

At least in my country (Finland), the development has been from state assistance (for instance, a tired single parent gets someone to help him/her a couple of times per week and do a bit of looking after the whole situation) to monetary payments (they get 123 € per week, which is taken away if they go to work, and they have freedom to decide what to do). And I must admit that when I was younger, I tended to be very liberal/libertarian (in the American sense) and say just giving people money and freedom is what we should do, but now I think it was a mistake. In the short term, people do hate waking up and going to work every day, even if in the long term they will live better lives if they do so.

True, but with a job, at least you're producing something. Well, there are also bullshit jobs, but I'd like to believe that most jobs still provide some kind of value in some way. The hoop jumping for the unemployed is just plain value destroying. If they could get an education or do charity work, they'd at least be doing something useful. I'd rather pay my taxes for that.

> Plenty of European examples abound where despite generous - some would argue very generous - state dispensed benefits certain sections of the society just do not respond positively in measures of improvement of their own station in life much less "working on things to improve everyone's else (lives)".

For many years people on English out of work benefits were not allowed to do voluntary work or be a student - those were things that would have stopped the benefits.

This carried over to some of the disability benefits. If you did voluntary work to prepare you to get back into full time work your benefits would be stopped.

Citing benefits street, and calling it a documentary, is an odd choice. Do you think that programme has any credibility?

I'm looking at the wiki[2] and 1. it's a documentary 2. it's on Channel 4 -- a public-service (non-commercial) channel in the UK.

Can you help add more context for what you're getting at?

Channel 4 is a "public service" channel only in the sense that it was one of the first four channels to come into existence at a time when the quid pro quo for having a broadcast licence was that challenging, worthy, high-quality programmes were broadcast.

Today, Channel 4 is still technically a PSB, but it's not and has never been "non-commercial" - it shows adverts and makes profits just like any other commercial channel.

Calling "Benefits Street" a documentary would be like saying that Jersey Shore or The Osbournes was a documentary. It's not.

The term "documentary" covers a broad range of material. There are in-depth explorations of fact or investigative reporting at one end; and populist fly on the wall fluff at the other end. Benefits Street is definitely on the fluffier end. There was little attempt to explain how benefits work; what the rules are or how they're applied to most people.

The OFCOM investigation is, I think, evidence that the programme was low quality, and focused on sensationalism rather than accuracy. (Although they didn't uphold any of the complaints).

Channel Four is publically owned but is not non-commercial -- it has to mostly fund itself; it carries ads and sells its programmes.

You're woefully misinformed about exactly how generous benefits in the UK are. People who do manage to live off benefits here can't expect a quality of life that even begins to approach comfortable.

You shouldn't let some opportunistic reality TV show be the basis for your world views.

  You shouldn't let some opportunistic reality TV show be  
  the basis for your world views.

Well if Western societies didn't function in a miasma of political correctness highly sensitive to even the least prickly of criticisms perhaps Channel 4 or any other outlet for that matter wouldn't have seen a need to reach for an alarmist tone in the way they fashioned their programming in matters such as this, that one could argue have influenced the most recent UK national parliamentary election.

The opinion polls suggested quite the opposite outcome [1] which goes to prove that many of the voters were quite concerned about the issues such as these and general direction in which UK as a sovereign nation was headed, but rather stopped short of voicing them openly, lest they be branded prejudicial or worse.

[1] Election 2015: How the opinion polls got it wrong

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-32751993

Benefits incentivize you to not work, because if you do, you lose benefits.

Poorly applied benefits do. If at any point, you lose $2 of benefits by earning $1 more, you are encouraged to not work harder. Of course there is a cap, such as if you earn $5,000 more you'll only lose $4,000, but people don't have the option to increase by $5,000 at a time and are stuck where working harder only earns you enough to cost even more in benefits than you earn, thus discouraging working harder.

I don't think what you're referencing works as a good counterexample. Currently benefits only goes to those who needs it or seeks it. It says little about how the people who don't need it, or wouldn't seek welfare payments they don't need, will behave.

I think public welfare systems has a tendency to make "leechers" more visible. They leech on the government rather than family and they probably tend to collect in specific areas, but I'm not convinced it makes the problem worse.

Although I think basic income would work, I agree that he was exaggerating when he wrote that it "seems pretty obvious". There are some evidence that it would be beneficial, and there's also some pretty straight-forward arguments for why it would be good on a national scale (less bureaucracy). But we won't know until we try. I think more experiments are in order (1: removing restrictions and terms of welfare payments to see if that leads to more undesirable behavior. 2: giving basic income to a whole town with correspondingly realistic taxes to see if working people's behavior changes)

But we got all those great British bands out of the deal.

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