I realize there's no data on this, but do these localized experiments translate into actual UBI at all? I only skimmed the article but it seems to me that giving 125 people 500$/Month, which come from a donation to research UBI, has basically no relation to actual UBI.
They found that giving those 125 people an unconditional monthly allowance helps them survive and has a positive effect on their life.
They did not seem to research at all how to actually fund it, what kind of effect a higher tax to fund it would have, or what would happen to the government employees currently working in social welfare if they'd lose their job.
In fairness, funding and spending are 2 separate problems. Other people can independently do research on whether a particular tax or some other spending cut is the best way to fund this.
I agree the same size is small (I thought it was 525), and I'd also say there is an issue with the length of the study.
But it should still provide some useful stats on how many people give up work or start businesses or go back to school and what the impact is on crime, drug use etc...
And that's the question here: how does this effect people's economic and social behaviour?
> But it should still provide some useful stats on how many people give up work or start businesses or go back to school and what the impact is on crime, drug use etc...
Why would "here's an extra $9k across 18 months" tell you anything about how a low income person would respond to being promised a livable income for life?
Because for those 18 months their lives would be different.
I'd like to see a 5+ yr study specifically because that would allow people to give up low paying jobs, go get a full degree and then get a new better paying job.
18 months isn't that, obviously.
But it would allow you to go and do something. Instead of going from being a waiter to a programmer, maybe you can go from being a waiter to a basic plumber or a truck driver or start a small business or something?
We can all agree that having more cash will improve people health\community\whatever. The big question is what will people do with the opportunity no-strings-attached cash gives them. How many people will just spend the money? How many people will stop working and do nothing useful? How many people will stop working and do something very very useful?
You only need a small proportion of people to make significant changes like this (and thus pay a lot more tax) and suddenly these programs get very affordable net.
You need a very large proportion to make changes like that if it's offset by people using the money to retire from working life altogether[1]. Since this choice can't be made with this study design, it tells us nothing about what people would actually do with no-strings attached money for life, and indeed actively distorts the reality of how people will respond by at least as much as that other great UBI experiment no UBI advocate ever talks about: state pensions....
[1]actually you need an implausibly large proportion simply to offset the amount of people who already don't work and aren't entitled to benefit payments who would be eligible to receive UBI
Respectfully, that is exactly what we need an experiment to prove\disprove. At least some people took this 9k as an opportunity to sit at home playing video games. At least some got a (small) education or started a business.
The issue with pensions as an example of UBI is that the only people getting them are old. So they mostly already have the assets they want, they don't have careers they want to improve, they don't want to start business or earn money, they want to retire...
Yes, old people are also an imperfect proxy for the workforce as a whole.
But this experiment which is designed to make it impossible for participants to retire off the money proves even less about people's likelihood of retiring off free money than the natural experiments where they're encouraged to do so.
Yeah, a bigger, longer, better funded trial would be better. But we can still learn some things from this. I actually get a bit frustrated at all the too small/short/low-amount payment studies out there. But c'est la vie.
tbf since their targeting was low income neighbourhoods, one can assume the higher income neighbourhoods would have contributed some of the share.
A fair experiment would have at least stripped away all the other state funded benefits UBI supposedly replaces, but I guess 'UBI is good for the spending power of single-income couples but leaves the poorest people much worse off' wasn't the headline the advocacy group was shooting for...
The participants should be voting on how much to take from those among them with the higher incomes. I mean--unless we're assessing how UBI might work in a country without democracy.
Democracy is not a free pas to vote anything, especially if it is negatively impact some people, otherwise you justify gang rapes as a majority decision.
Sure, but it's tough to imagine in today's climate that a majority of voters living only on UBI would vote to maintain or lower the amount of money given directly to them from the top X%.
We already have the issue today but it's not quite so direct.
This is a huge problem with UBI. Maybe people will have to make a choice, either live on UBI or vote, but not both - it is immoral to vote for your own benefits.
Also what kind of effect on pricing it would have. Surely if everyone's baseline income increases, it creates a safe buffer-of-a-sort that necessities' prices (housing, food) can comfortably consume.
Housing prices are barely correlated with incomes in a meaningful way across cities, let alone caused by them. See [1]. The #1 determinant of housing prices is supply, which is usually an issue of regulation, not of local ability to pay rent/mortgage. There's not much consensus on this topic among economists since there are so many confounding factors - the best paper I've seen so far is [2] which finds that income increases via minimum wage hikes might increase rents anywhere from a quarter to a half of the wage increase, absent other factors.
I do wonder what the inflationary effects of UBI would be. In areas where there simply isn't enough spacious housing to meet demand (which includes most of the internationally known cities in the west), you'd expect to see rents rise - not really changing much.
However, people often want to live in these areas because jobs are there. The trend over the last 40 years has been for the decline of industrial areas as factories close. In most post-industrial countries there's towns and cities with really cheap housing - because there's no high paying jobs nearby. I wonder if UBI would have a longer term effect of injecting money into these areas, increasing prosperity and drawing in people who live in expensive cities but have seen their UBI get inflated to zero.
I don't think food (as in, grains and vegetables and meat) will be subject to the same inflationary problem - there's not the same fundamental supply limit that you get with housing in a city.
In the US we’re nowhere near running out of space.
I live in one of the most wealthy and densest areas in the US and like to go up to the roof of the building. When I look out it’s pretty much just trees with some 1-3 story buildings and lots of parking lots with occasional clusters of high density buildings like the one I live in. 30-60 miles south of here it’s almost completely undeveloped nothingness (some farms and gas stations but mostly forest.) The rest of the entire state (Save a few small cities) is like that too.
That so many people in the US can’t afford housing is a spectacular social failure. It feels similar to California’s water problem; yes it’s possible to run out of the resource but if you actually look at how it’s used it’s just very very poorly allocated.
> They did not seem to research at all how to actually fund it
And this is really the most profound part. There isn't an argument to be made against "if people have more money to buy stuff they will be better off". Nobody can argue against that, it is true.
The _entire_ case against that sort of social spending is "but we need normal people to create more than they consume or the resources won't be available" and "this isn't fair on the people who have to support them" argued at varying levels of complexity and indirection.
If you ignore the negative outcomes then any plan is a good plan and only has positive outcomes. Duh.
I disagree, it’s not the fairness, or the overproduction, but the best overall benefit to society given the money spent. Social programs that already exist are a progressive tax that penalizes healthy, working people more than those who are receiving the benefit. Examples: unemployment, Medicaid, WIC, Saver’s Credit.
The level of productivity per capita in the economy today is vastly more than enough to supply our entire population with only a fraction working.
There's also plenty of information indicating that if given the choice, most people actually want to work...they just don't want to be working shit jobs for shit pay for shit bosses.
The aim of UBI is not to make people better off, but to ensure that everyone has enough money to live on. It's intended to replace means-tested social security.
With UBI, nobody falls through the safety net and ends up with nothing to live on; you don't need an army of people assessing claimants' financial circumstances; and when someone finds a low-paid or part-time job they still keep their UBI, so there's no disincentive to work.
If you argue it's unfair that people pay for UBI, how is that different from arguing that it's unfair that people pay for means-tested social security (or poor people's medical bills)?
> If you argue it's unfair that people pay for UBI, how is that different from arguing that it's unfair that people pay for means-tested social security (or poor people's medical bills)?
There's a big difference between a welfare state designed as a form of social insurance to protect people from adverse circumstances and old age, and one designed on the assumption that those who want to work owe those who don't a living, and that the only circumstance that should affect how much people receive is whether they have the right citizenship.
Aside from the fundamental ethical rationale changing from contribution based social insurance to citizenship based entitlement, UBI would also represent a much larger bill, and a lower payout to the neediest.
Lots of loaded words in there, and not really fairly.
Nobody 'owes' anybody a living. The situation is, we can give most folks a living, without everyone working. And those that continue to work, of course are better off because they earn money for that. No unfairness at all.
I think its the old Protestant work ethic, this attitude of "folks not working are immoral". We have to get past this, to make UBI a thing.
The literal purpose of UBI is to ensure that taxpayers do owe each citizen a fixed amount set at an average living.
Making that a social obligation based on birthright rather than a potential future entitlement based on need is how it's different from social insurance schemes. The assumption if you're able to work and not interested in looking for it you probably don't need the money as much as other people certainly isn't what's wrong with current welfare states.
You don't have to believe that "folks not working are immoral" to believe that helping those fortunate enough to be able to choose not to work at the expense of those that aren't [whether by reduced benefits or higher taxes] isn't what welfare states were for.
Yeah no. Its a new system of course, not the same as the one we are in. To work indefinitely, and not just through a tax or currency scheme, the results of automation would have to be reconsidered. Now if somebody builds a factory, the factory belongs to them but also the output of the factory forever belongs to them. This creates a huge imbalance, with some folks 'earning' hundreds of millions a year forever, for no real effort beyond the initial investment.
If something like VAT were used, it would change things. Without dis-incentivizing real work. This system is already in use around the world, just not in America at the moment.
I live in a post-industrial, omnipresent-VAT European world, and it doesn't make UBI any more affordable in the foreseeable future.
I think we can consider the results of just-around-the-corner-for-200-years automation-induced mass unemployment if and when it actually happens, although I'm still unconvinced that delinking benefit income from desire to actually find work or any other kind of demonstrable need would be the best solution.
Under UBI, how many people would willingly give up their jobs just to live on a subsistence level income, and for no other reason (e.g. study or childcare)?
Under means-tested benefits, how many people without work are discouraged from taking low-paid or part-time work because their social security payments are clawed back, resulting in no financial gain for them?
> Under UBI, how many people would willingly give up their jobs just to live on a subsistence level income, and for no other reason (e.g. study or childcare)?
Well the proportion will probably be smaller than the vast majority, skewed towards the asset rich when state pension ages kick in, but I don't think it'll be zero. Though even if it was zero, you've got the problem that under normal circumstances a full third of the population already doesn't work or seek benefits, and suddenly you've got to find the funds for them.
> Under means-tested benefits, how many people without work are discouraged from taking low-paid or part-time work because their social security payments are clawed back, resulting in no financial gain for them?
Relatively few even without competently-designed tapers and EITC schemes, bearing in mind the number of people receiving benefits contingent on unemployment is normally a relatively tiny fraction of the working age population.
It is a little while since my 'experiment' with benefits, but in the UK benefits are a real poverty trap. If you take a single days work you can lose a month of certain benefits. Housing benefit was the worst. The next cap was a 16 hour a week rule, that after 16 hours work you lost some of your 'working tax credit', which made you worse off unless you could jump straight to near 40 hours.
Seeing the poverty trap for myself, I am a huge fan of UBI
The literal purpose of UBI is to ensure that taxpayers do owe each citizen a fixed amount set at an average living.
Not average. It's Basic. It's just enough to get by. That's the incentive to work: most people want to do more than just get by. Anyone who doesn't want that would be a drag on any system, so that's a separate problem to deal with. But there are a lot of people who can't get ahead with the current system who would do better in a UBI system, and we'd all be better off if we could get those people productive and happy.
my bad, that was supposed to be average living wage, with living wage being the concept of a just-above-subsistence income. The 'average' part of that phrase is important because a basic living in one region can be quite a comfortable living in another, or for someone not needing to factor rent into their cost of living, but it helps if I don't miss the other key word out :)
I would imagine that if a national UBI program were implemented, the amount would have to depend on the local cost of living, probably with caps. How they'd work that out, I don't know.
If that's not done, then UBI would encourage migration from higher cost-of-living areas to lower cost-of-living areas. That might not be a terrible outcome; it would probably lead to balancing the cost-of-living across regions as the populations change.
"most people want to do more than just get by" maybe so, maybe not?
There's a massive gap between wanting something and doing what it takes to get it. If you were to ask people vs. watch what they do, you'll see the truth; it's never about what people say but instead what they do.
And I'd welcome any supporting research demonstrating that, based off their actions, "most people want to do more than just get by" as stated. My anecdotal observation is that most of (working age) society actually does just enough to get by for today, this week, or maybe the month...
> The aim of UBI is not to make people better off, but to ensure that everyone has enough money to live on.
I think there is an entirely reasonable argument that having enough money to live on (guaranteed) would make people better off.
If a policy isn't being done to make people better off, why do it? The easiest way to maintain the status quo is to do nothing - rather than finding innovative ways to maintain stasis but with new laws.
> If you argue it's unfair that people pay for UBI, how is that different from arguing that it's unfair that people pay for means-tested social security (or poor people's medical bills)?
Yep. The argument against most social spending boils down to the same two things. Sometimes other arguments do crop up (eg, some truly foolish policies incentivise destructive behaviour).
For many, many things its not really a questions of 'normal people creating" resources. Because most goods are not made by people on assembly lines any more. That's pretty much a tiny fraction.
Automation means, only the Engineers and Maintenance people need report to work to keep the goods flowing. Its been happening for 20 years, and accelerating.
The UBI may not be quite ready to deploy, but its coming. If we try it too soon, then some goods will indeed become scarcer and thus more expensive. But many things may continue just as they are. We want to make sure that's enough to keep everyone healthy and fed.
I don't see the point of these small studies at all. Many people already have some form of UBI like pensioners. That their lives are pretty relaxed should come as no surprise.
The most important thing to study is the effect of UBI on total economy. Saudi Arabia is an interesting example, since their economy pretty much runs on free oil money. Saudi nationals are notorious for having bad work ethics, and they have to import many foreign workers to run the economy. To prepare the country for a post oil world companies are now required to hire a minimum percentage of Saudi nationals.
This is one of the macroeconomic scenarios that scares me the most. I can't imagine what would happen to the global socio-economic stability if those middle east countries were to lose that source of GDP. It's not to unreasonable to conceive either as more countries are becoming oil energy independent.
> what would happen to the global socio-economic stability if those middle east countries were to lose that source of GDP
Tumultuous transition period followed by quiet.
The same wealth that currently placates them also enables them to project power. And when the wealth disappears, infighting is more likely than outward violence.
After the initial period of reorganisation, it will settle into a state similar to other formerly-wealth now-impoverished nations.
Open it up to all legal resident of a country, not just citizens, and you avoid this problem. The gulf state / Singapore two-tiers model begets these things.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the Saudi setup a lot more like a government "jobs" guarantee where the job was rather pointless. The lack of ability to do a real job without giving up the zero stress bs job would certainly seem to breed a lack of work ethic.
UBI, on the other hand, rewards anyone who works on top of the UBI supplement. There is no need to choose between working and getting the "free" money everyone else is getting.
Another question I never see answered is if people are better off on UBI instead of welfare/food stamps/etc. Most of the time I hear people talking about finding UBI, they say it will replace existing social programs, but no UBI experiment that I have seen actually tests if people are better off with cash instead of social assistance.
This is a valid point. I’ve never seen a response to how you make sure the spending goes to the resources. While one can argue that the people should be adults, reality shows that is not true. Having the infrastructure to pay rent automatically by the government means rent is paid. What do we do when people piss away their UBI and don’t have money for the necessities?
Anyone who intentionally did that would soon find themselves without accommodation or food. If it's because they can't budget, it could be paid to them weekly or even daily. People who can't manage their own lives (e.g. mentally ill, drug addicts) would need to be given help, whatever safety net there is.
The point of UBI is to remove non-private charity support. How will politicians react when people are dying in the streets? The US is not about persons responsiblity.
Yeah, that’s exactly what happens. People make bad choices, and we care because innocents like children suffer.
We have the programs we have now because giving away cash didn’t work. Recipients drank it away and landlords gouged them.
A program like Section 8 for housing balances those issues — the landlord gets paid on time every month, but is on the hook for a minimum standard of maintenance and livability. That’s why we don’t have children in tenements anymore.
Every once in awhile politicians and academics who know everything show up with a magic wand. UBI is no different.
I don't know of any country other than the US which gives food stamps to unemployed people. Elsewhere, they're given cash payments, and the alcohol abuse problem you mention is rare enough that food stamps aren't considered as an alternative. In the UK, there's housing benefit which might be similar to the US's Section 8. As rents/mortgage interest payments vary depending on where you live, it makes sense for this to be paid, directly to the landlord/bank, in addition to unemployment benefit.
Proposed UBI amounts would barely even cover health insurance premiums and deductibles on the individual market for a single person, let alone a family.
If UBI were to replace social services like general assistance, housing assistance, SNAP, WIC, CHIP, Medicaid etc, it would cause many people to choose eating over healthcare, or paying rent over seeing a doctor and eating.
In my opinion, general UBI needs to be issued alongside programs that target specific issues that are endemic to our current economic order. That includes programs that fight hunger, and the lack of access to affordable housing, healthcare and education.
Read the Tryanny of Kindness. It is from 1993 and is a former welfare mother and advocate who advocates for a guaranteed income.
The book goes into great length of the pathology of the welfare system and its non-profit charity profiteers. Of course that was 27 years ago.
It obviously depends on the UBI. If it covered children, it would be absolutely better for the recipients. If it does not cover children, as in Yang's plan, then it is questionable, but it still could benefit a lot because many do not get it at all:
How do you propose that UBI be tested? If you give it to a small number of people, or to everyone for a limited time, it's argued it isn't UBI.
Various services are funded out of taxation at present.
The higher gross tax rate would be offset by UBI (those in work would get it too), so the mean net tax rate shouldn't change much.
What would happen to the government employees currently working in social welfare if they'd lose their job is that they'd get UBI until they were given or found more productive work.
Hey, don't worry; we are just taxing the negative externalities of your existence.
This is an authoritarian dream, and it's why cash has a big target on it.
Got a fine? Deduct it. Putting people on the take gives government significantly more leverage over them.
Next up is to incrementally pair it with a social credit score. The concept is fundamentally against free expression; it's the same old model used keep large fractions of social classes from becoming independent.
Real solutions involve decentralization and less tax on _time_, the power players want cheap labor, so they were allowed to import it. That scam is well known now, so onto plan B.
This is really a proposal for extreme centralization via hidden tax on value producers. It's a deliberate problem; hence the Hegel soluton.
I think all libertanians would agree with that logic :)
In theory you should be able to come up with some minimal necessary set of laws and policies, pass apropriate parlimentary bills once, and after that parliament becomes unncecessary, or maybe it just gathers in session once a year, to evaluate the need for new laws.
Also, to encourage long-term thinking it should be written into Constitution that any new law passed can only take effect 10 years after it was passed, not sooner.
If you want to give people money, make it yourself first. Then you are free to give it all away to serial murderers and junkies and cartel members and prostitutes and white collar crooks and drunken mobs that burn down my home all you want.
By your logic we should ignore some of the most obvious psychological properites of humans AND pretend there isnt billions+ $ spent on studying and exploiting exactly that.
You still require centralization of some form to ensure enforment of property via violence, as economic injustices only get worse. Allowing each to enforce property according to their means is feudalism. Why not just trust democratic solutions instead of constantly working to build wealth hierarchies?
This would be funny if it wasn't sad (the ignorance of the Marxists who made this happen and the writer).
Who's going to work (or, why would anyone work) and pay for BI if they can get by on BI and a bit of undeclared work on the side?
Next article in the series: the promising results of city-wide looting (people found to be better off, store owners made whole by the rich insurance companies - eff yeah!)
I think UBI is an essential concept and believe will be no way around it in some fashion.
That said, "AB testing" it is really hard. The real idea behind UBI (for most advocates) is that it is a living wage granted for a very long time (something like lifetimes). $500/mo for a few months or years means that people need to still plan around that loss of income, and are unlikely to act too differently.
I like research, but I don't really see much benefit here. I think you justify UBI on these grounds:
1) administration costs are much higher for welfare states than UBI (the US spends more on anti poverty programs than it would take to distribute funds and make nobody below the US poverty line). This should appeal to fiscal conservatives. Our anti poverty programs have failed not due to resources, but rather due to centralized, command and control techniques a la ISSUE.
2) the number of people that are completely unemployable (they are not able to outcompete machines/AI at any narrow job function) will increase.
Number (2) is more speculative for most people, but having automated away many jobs myself, I can see that the only reason things are not more automated is the will of leaders to automate. Most people lack the will, but that won't stop it in the long run, only slow it.
The big problem with (1) is that it's unambiguously falsified by widely available data.
Approximately 75 million working age US citizens are 'economically inactive' in normal times - i.e. they're not working or paying income/payroll taxes, and in most cases are ineligible for any other type of benefit. The US poverty line is 12k.
You're not finding all that extra money from admin costs
This isn't a basic income experiment. It's a grant-based income subsidy.
What a real basic income experiment would look like:
- Take a nominally populated county.
- Calculate a baseline income requirement necessary to live in the county.
- Completely gut all of the economic service programs (carefully without breaking federal law).
- Pool all that extra money together and divide it by the population.
- Add some sort of VAT to county sales to cover the difference between what UBI should be and how much money is in the kitty.
- Do a test run of at least 18-24 months.
Things to pay attention to:
- County sales tax receipts.
- School attendance.
- Employment, especially seasonal employment.
- Crime.
- Costs of groceries, restaurants, contractor services, etc.
- Mean age of retirement.
- Employment of those 18-25.
- Rent prices
Things to consider:
- Are state pensions on the chopping block?
- Are you going to implement basic income as UBI + earned income or the greater of the two?
- Is there any opportunity to debit federally mandated economic support from the UBI totals?
Hurdles:
- Without buy in at the state level, how are you going to prevent people from buying their groceries across county lines, or doing most of their retail online?
- Unless you pick the county properly (a proper mix of employment + age demographics), you'll have large problems on your hand.
- Serious local, national, and possibly international pressure to derail the program.
That's certainly one way to do it. Maybe the best way. But there's all sorts of things to study, and it may be valuable to try and study them in isolation.
The psychological and resultant behavioral impact on tax base whales and the liquidity of labor are the most important things to study. I can't reasonably think of a means to study those outside of an academic scenario.
I know that where I live, state pensions can’t be touched, as the state Supreme Court has determined they are owned by the employees, not by the state.
There's just no One True Basic Income Experiment, it seems.
But realistically speaking, when it happens, it won't be a big national program, it will more likely look like a patchwork of different city-wide and regional programs brought under a federal banner, decades from now.
The incentives associated with a temporary stipend are totally different from the incentives associated with a permanent guaranteed stipend. I would argue that the only way to truly test the impact of UBI is to make actual, lifetime guarantees of UBI payments.
The way a worker uses a temporary stipend will be greatly influenced by the knowledge that the payments will end, at which point the worker will be required to support themselves again. With that knowledge, it makes perfect sense to spend the UBI stipend on furthering your education, paying off debt, etc. This strikes me as the logical use of a temporary UBI stipend. This is what I would do.
But is the same true about a permanent UBI stipend? Maybe, maybe not.
These experiments are not testing the impacts of a real UBI.
I am concerned that UBI as a whole will make the divorce between economy and productivity, just like artificial pumping by the government divorces stock market from the economy.
An individual will have this illusion of they are fine in life, as long as UBI coming in, even though they are not productive at all.
Stability of a government is never guaranteed. What if one day, for whatever reason, whether the government go rogue, or the government has no more money or assets, decide to stop UBI. A lot of people will suddenly be unprepared to come to terms with the actual reality, that they don't have the needed marketable skills to survive in the world because they have been living off UBI all these times without cultivating themselves.
That's only the case if most people are happy sitting back and living off UBI. That's not a given.
I've known people who inherited reasonable sums of money - enough to live a frugal life for a decade or so. None of them have quit their jobs and lived frugally for a decade.
What that money has allowed is security. It's allowed them to take career risks, or go back to university and retrain.
That's obviously anecdotal - my network skews educated and career driven to start with. It would be interesting to know how many people would just sit back and do nothing. It would also be interesting to know how inflationary the effect of everyone having that UBI would be - so much of the value of money comes from its relative scarcity, so maybe we'd find that if everyone has a basic income then the threshold for security just goes up.
I'm not sure how we'd establish that without trying it though.
I agree with you completely that it's a problem when society as a whole doesn't have a good idea of what it means to be "productive" but I think that in your second sentence, you could just as easily replace "UBI" with "wages" and the truthfulness of it doesn't change at all. I think working for wages doesn't allow most people to do what I would consider "cultivating themselves," and possessing "marketable" skills is not the same thing as possessing useful skills.
Obviously we all have our own definitions of "productive" (I actually like to think of it more as useful rather than profitable) but my own personal opinion is that what is useful and what people get paid for have as little overlap as they've ever had, so the risk of replacing certain jobs with UBI isn't actually as much of a threat to productivity as it might seem like.
Destroy people with the ugliest and dirtiest tricks imaginable. Then pay them off to stop a civil revolt or mass die off. How about you just stop being mean to people? Walk away, give back instead of chasing endless celebrity? If you want to be Mother Theresa, first join a nunnery. This is battle royal, a free for all on the Serenghetti. You're not fooling anyone.
Let's say a human traffic victim shows up with a fake ID. You have to pay a check, right? Some killer shows up on payday and beats her up, along with a hundred others, and sends the money back to Haiti or the Philippines to smuggle in nerve gas or fentanyl.
Not only does that happen, that's the norm not the exception. Go live in the real world please. See what people really are like.
You don't want to do the right thing.
You don't want to make things better.
You don't want to even have a good time.
You want power, and be the only one who has power. You will do anything because once you stop, you have to be accountable to all your past crimes.
Easiest way to win an election? Push out voters with high standards that make you work. Bring in voters with no standards who vote because they are told.
Are a lot of people going to use the UBI to better themselves? A large number will probably end up hanging out. Or work a few years to save for a downpayment, then end up hanging out.
It will prob speed up automation. Like some 40 year old with no skills is gonna suddenly re-skill and being a computer programmer? Lol.
Just gonna be a bunch of people chilling on the taxpayers dime. Reproducing, taking up space, etc.
Everything is going to be a sharp bimodal distribution. Those that are productive, get paid a ton. Those who aren't productive and just chill all day on UBI.
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They found that giving those 125 people an unconditional monthly allowance helps them survive and has a positive effect on their life.
They did not seem to research at all how to actually fund it, what kind of effect a higher tax to fund it would have, or what would happen to the government employees currently working in social welfare if they'd lose their job.
I agree the same size is small (I thought it was 525), and I'd also say there is an issue with the length of the study.
But it should still provide some useful stats on how many people give up work or start businesses or go back to school and what the impact is on crime, drug use etc...
And that's the question here: how does this effect people's economic and social behaviour?
Why would "here's an extra $9k across 18 months" tell you anything about how a low income person would respond to being promised a livable income for life?
I'd like to see a 5+ yr study specifically because that would allow people to give up low paying jobs, go get a full degree and then get a new better paying job.
18 months isn't that, obviously.
But it would allow you to go and do something. Instead of going from being a waiter to a programmer, maybe you can go from being a waiter to a basic plumber or a truck driver or start a small business or something?
We can all agree that having more cash will improve people health\community\whatever. The big question is what will people do with the opportunity no-strings-attached cash gives them. How many people will just spend the money? How many people will stop working and do nothing useful? How many people will stop working and do something very very useful?
You only need a small proportion of people to make significant changes like this (and thus pay a lot more tax) and suddenly these programs get very affordable net.
[1]actually you need an implausibly large proportion simply to offset the amount of people who already don't work and aren't entitled to benefit payments who would be eligible to receive UBI
The issue with pensions as an example of UBI is that the only people getting them are old. So they mostly already have the assets they want, they don't have careers they want to improve, they don't want to start business or earn money, they want to retire...
But this experiment which is designed to make it impossible for participants to retire off the money proves even less about people's likelihood of retiring off free money than the natural experiments where they're encouraged to do so.
A fair experiment would have at least stripped away all the other state funded benefits UBI supposedly replaces, but I guess 'UBI is good for the spending power of single-income couples but leaves the poorest people much worse off' wasn't the headline the advocacy group was shooting for...
The participants should be voting on how much to take from those among them with the higher incomes. I mean--unless we're assessing how UBI might work in a country without democracy.
We already have the issue today but it's not quite so direct.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/07/heres-the-share-of-income-th...
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3282661
However, people often want to live in these areas because jobs are there. The trend over the last 40 years has been for the decline of industrial areas as factories close. In most post-industrial countries there's towns and cities with really cheap housing - because there's no high paying jobs nearby. I wonder if UBI would have a longer term effect of injecting money into these areas, increasing prosperity and drawing in people who live in expensive cities but have seen their UBI get inflated to zero.
I don't think food (as in, grains and vegetables and meat) will be subject to the same inflationary problem - there's not the same fundamental supply limit that you get with housing in a city.
I think we should try it though.
That so many people in the US can’t afford housing is a spectacular social failure. It feels similar to California’s water problem; yes it’s possible to run out of the resource but if you actually look at how it’s used it’s just very very poorly allocated.
And this is really the most profound part. There isn't an argument to be made against "if people have more money to buy stuff they will be better off". Nobody can argue against that, it is true.
The _entire_ case against that sort of social spending is "but we need normal people to create more than they consume or the resources won't be available" and "this isn't fair on the people who have to support them" argued at varying levels of complexity and indirection.
If you ignore the negative outcomes then any plan is a good plan and only has positive outcomes. Duh.
There's also plenty of information indicating that if given the choice, most people actually want to work...they just don't want to be working shit jobs for shit pay for shit bosses.
I'm not saying finance is all bad, I'm saying when the financial situation is harder to understand than the so-called "real economy"...don't!
With UBI, nobody falls through the safety net and ends up with nothing to live on; you don't need an army of people assessing claimants' financial circumstances; and when someone finds a low-paid or part-time job they still keep their UBI, so there's no disincentive to work.
If you argue it's unfair that people pay for UBI, how is that different from arguing that it's unfair that people pay for means-tested social security (or poor people's medical bills)?
There's a big difference between a welfare state designed as a form of social insurance to protect people from adverse circumstances and old age, and one designed on the assumption that those who want to work owe those who don't a living, and that the only circumstance that should affect how much people receive is whether they have the right citizenship.
Aside from the fundamental ethical rationale changing from contribution based social insurance to citizenship based entitlement, UBI would also represent a much larger bill, and a lower payout to the neediest.
Nobody 'owes' anybody a living. The situation is, we can give most folks a living, without everyone working. And those that continue to work, of course are better off because they earn money for that. No unfairness at all.
I think its the old Protestant work ethic, this attitude of "folks not working are immoral". We have to get past this, to make UBI a thing.
The literal purpose of UBI is to ensure that taxpayers do owe each citizen a fixed amount set at an average living. Making that a social obligation based on birthright rather than a potential future entitlement based on need is how it's different from social insurance schemes. The assumption if you're able to work and not interested in looking for it you probably don't need the money as much as other people certainly isn't what's wrong with current welfare states.
You don't have to believe that "folks not working are immoral" to believe that helping those fortunate enough to be able to choose not to work at the expense of those that aren't [whether by reduced benefits or higher taxes] isn't what welfare states were for.
If something like VAT were used, it would change things. Without dis-incentivizing real work. This system is already in use around the world, just not in America at the moment.
I think we can consider the results of just-around-the-corner-for-200-years automation-induced mass unemployment if and when it actually happens, although I'm still unconvinced that delinking benefit income from desire to actually find work or any other kind of demonstrable need would be the best solution.
Under means-tested benefits, how many people without work are discouraged from taking low-paid or part-time work because their social security payments are clawed back, resulting in no financial gain for them?
Well the proportion will probably be smaller than the vast majority, skewed towards the asset rich when state pension ages kick in, but I don't think it'll be zero. Though even if it was zero, you've got the problem that under normal circumstances a full third of the population already doesn't work or seek benefits, and suddenly you've got to find the funds for them.
> Under means-tested benefits, how many people without work are discouraged from taking low-paid or part-time work because their social security payments are clawed back, resulting in no financial gain for them?
Relatively few even without competently-designed tapers and EITC schemes, bearing in mind the number of people receiving benefits contingent on unemployment is normally a relatively tiny fraction of the working age population.
It is a little while since my 'experiment' with benefits, but in the UK benefits are a real poverty trap. If you take a single days work you can lose a month of certain benefits. Housing benefit was the worst. The next cap was a 16 hour a week rule, that after 16 hours work you lost some of your 'working tax credit', which made you worse off unless you could jump straight to near 40 hours.
Seeing the poverty trap for myself, I am a huge fan of UBI
Not average. It's Basic. It's just enough to get by. That's the incentive to work: most people want to do more than just get by. Anyone who doesn't want that would be a drag on any system, so that's a separate problem to deal with. But there are a lot of people who can't get ahead with the current system who would do better in a UBI system, and we'd all be better off if we could get those people productive and happy.
If that's not done, then UBI would encourage migration from higher cost-of-living areas to lower cost-of-living areas. That might not be a terrible outcome; it would probably lead to balancing the cost-of-living across regions as the populations change.
There's a massive gap between wanting something and doing what it takes to get it. If you were to ask people vs. watch what they do, you'll see the truth; it's never about what people say but instead what they do.
And I'd welcome any supporting research demonstrating that, based off their actions, "most people want to do more than just get by" as stated. My anecdotal observation is that most of (working age) society actually does just enough to get by for today, this week, or maybe the month...
I think there is an entirely reasonable argument that having enough money to live on (guaranteed) would make people better off.
If a policy isn't being done to make people better off, why do it? The easiest way to maintain the status quo is to do nothing - rather than finding innovative ways to maintain stasis but with new laws.
> If you argue it's unfair that people pay for UBI, how is that different from arguing that it's unfair that people pay for means-tested social security (or poor people's medical bills)?
Yep. The argument against most social spending boils down to the same two things. Sometimes other arguments do crop up (eg, some truly foolish policies incentivise destructive behaviour).
Automation means, only the Engineers and Maintenance people need report to work to keep the goods flowing. Its been happening for 20 years, and accelerating.
The UBI may not be quite ready to deploy, but its coming. If we try it too soon, then some goods will indeed become scarcer and thus more expensive. But many things may continue just as they are. We want to make sure that's enough to keep everyone healthy and fed.
The most important thing to study is the effect of UBI on total economy. Saudi Arabia is an interesting example, since their economy pretty much runs on free oil money. Saudi nationals are notorious for having bad work ethics, and they have to import many foreign workers to run the economy. To prepare the country for a post oil world companies are now required to hire a minimum percentage of Saudi nationals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudization
Tumultuous transition period followed by quiet.
The same wealth that currently placates them also enables them to project power. And when the wealth disappears, infighting is more likely than outward violence.
After the initial period of reorganisation, it will settle into a state similar to other formerly-wealth now-impoverished nations.
UBI, on the other hand, rewards anyone who works on top of the UBI supplement. There is no need to choose between working and getting the "free" money everyone else is getting.
We give mothers baby formula because we want babies to have adequate nutrition. If you hand out cash, some percentage of people will buy beer instead.
We have the programs we have now because giving away cash didn’t work. Recipients drank it away and landlords gouged them.
A program like Section 8 for housing balances those issues — the landlord gets paid on time every month, but is on the hook for a minimum standard of maintenance and livability. That’s why we don’t have children in tenements anymore.
Every once in awhile politicians and academics who know everything show up with a magic wand. UBI is no different.
If UBI were to replace social services like general assistance, housing assistance, SNAP, WIC, CHIP, Medicaid etc, it would cause many people to choose eating over healthcare, or paying rent over seeing a doctor and eating.
In my opinion, general UBI needs to be issued alongside programs that target specific issues that are endemic to our current economic order. That includes programs that fight hunger, and the lack of access to affordable housing, healthcare and education.
The book goes into great length of the pathology of the welfare system and its non-profit charity profiteers. Of course that was 27 years ago.
It obviously depends on the UBI. If it covered children, it would be absolutely better for the recipients. If it does not cover children, as in Yang's plan, then it is questionable, but it still could benefit a lot because many do not get it at all:
https://medium.com/basic-income/there-is-no-policy-proposal-...
http://www.scottsantens.com/tanf-is-terrible
Various services are funded out of taxation at present. The higher gross tax rate would be offset by UBI (those in work would get it too), so the mean net tax rate shouldn't change much.
What would happen to the government employees currently working in social welfare if they'd lose their job is that they'd get UBI until they were given or found more productive work.
This is an authoritarian dream, and it's why cash has a big target on it.
Got a fine? Deduct it. Putting people on the take gives government significantly more leverage over them.
Next up is to incrementally pair it with a social credit score. The concept is fundamentally against free expression; it's the same old model used keep large fractions of social classes from becoming independent.
Real solutions involve decentralization and less tax on _time_, the power players want cheap labor, so they were allowed to import it. That scam is well known now, so onto plan B.
This is really a proposal for extreme centralization via hidden tax on value producers. It's a deliberate problem; hence the Hegel soluton.
Which part of “unconditional” do you not understand?
In theory you should be able to come up with some minimal necessary set of laws and policies, pass apropriate parlimentary bills once, and after that parliament becomes unncecessary, or maybe it just gathers in session once a year, to evaluate the need for new laws.
Also, to encourage long-term thinking it should be written into Constitution that any new law passed can only take effect 10 years after it was passed, not sooner.
If you want to give people money, make it yourself first. Then you are free to give it all away to serial murderers and junkies and cartel members and prostitutes and white collar crooks and drunken mobs that burn down my home all you want.
The income tax was temporary. Right?
Consider someone hired to normalize something that is already being done. You dont need to tell them. Just pay them. Current example: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/hunting-humans-set-...
Heck make movies about it. Pro/con is irrelevant in the early stages.
Who's going to work (or, why would anyone work) and pay for BI if they can get by on BI and a bit of undeclared work on the side?
Next article in the series: the promising results of city-wide looting (people found to be better off, store owners made whole by the rich insurance companies - eff yeah!)
That said, "AB testing" it is really hard. The real idea behind UBI (for most advocates) is that it is a living wage granted for a very long time (something like lifetimes). $500/mo for a few months or years means that people need to still plan around that loss of income, and are unlikely to act too differently.
I like research, but I don't really see much benefit here. I think you justify UBI on these grounds: 1) administration costs are much higher for welfare states than UBI (the US spends more on anti poverty programs than it would take to distribute funds and make nobody below the US poverty line). This should appeal to fiscal conservatives. Our anti poverty programs have failed not due to resources, but rather due to centralized, command and control techniques a la ISSUE. 2) the number of people that are completely unemployable (they are not able to outcompete machines/AI at any narrow job function) will increase.
Number (2) is more speculative for most people, but having automated away many jobs myself, I can see that the only reason things are not more automated is the will of leaders to automate. Most people lack the will, but that won't stop it in the long run, only slow it.
Approximately 75 million working age US citizens are 'economically inactive' in normal times - i.e. they're not working or paying income/payroll taxes, and in most cases are ineligible for any other type of benefit. The US poverty line is 12k.
You're not finding all that extra money from admin costs
What a real basic income experiment would look like:
- Take a nominally populated county.
- Calculate a baseline income requirement necessary to live in the county.
- Completely gut all of the economic service programs (carefully without breaking federal law).
- Pool all that extra money together and divide it by the population.
- Add some sort of VAT to county sales to cover the difference between what UBI should be and how much money is in the kitty.
- Do a test run of at least 18-24 months.
Things to pay attention to:
- County sales tax receipts.
- School attendance.
- Employment, especially seasonal employment.
- Crime.
- Costs of groceries, restaurants, contractor services, etc.
- Mean age of retirement.
- Employment of those 18-25.
- Rent prices
Things to consider:
- Are state pensions on the chopping block?
- Are you going to implement basic income as UBI + earned income or the greater of the two?
- Is there any opportunity to debit federally mandated economic support from the UBI totals?
Hurdles:
- Without buy in at the state level, how are you going to prevent people from buying their groceries across county lines, or doing most of their retail online?
- Unless you pick the county properly (a proper mix of employment + age demographics), you'll have large problems on your hand.
- Serious local, national, and possibly international pressure to derail the program.
But realistically speaking, when it happens, it won't be a big national program, it will more likely look like a patchwork of different city-wide and regional programs brought under a federal banner, decades from now.
The way a worker uses a temporary stipend will be greatly influenced by the knowledge that the payments will end, at which point the worker will be required to support themselves again. With that knowledge, it makes perfect sense to spend the UBI stipend on furthering your education, paying off debt, etc. This strikes me as the logical use of a temporary UBI stipend. This is what I would do.
But is the same true about a permanent UBI stipend? Maybe, maybe not.
These experiments are not testing the impacts of a real UBI.
An individual will have this illusion of they are fine in life, as long as UBI coming in, even though they are not productive at all.
Stability of a government is never guaranteed. What if one day, for whatever reason, whether the government go rogue, or the government has no more money or assets, decide to stop UBI. A lot of people will suddenly be unprepared to come to terms with the actual reality, that they don't have the needed marketable skills to survive in the world because they have been living off UBI all these times without cultivating themselves.
I've known people who inherited reasonable sums of money - enough to live a frugal life for a decade or so. None of them have quit their jobs and lived frugally for a decade.
What that money has allowed is security. It's allowed them to take career risks, or go back to university and retrain.
That's obviously anecdotal - my network skews educated and career driven to start with. It would be interesting to know how many people would just sit back and do nothing. It would also be interesting to know how inflationary the effect of everyone having that UBI would be - so much of the value of money comes from its relative scarcity, so maybe we'd find that if everyone has a basic income then the threshold for security just goes up.
I'm not sure how we'd establish that without trying it though.
Obviously we all have our own definitions of "productive" (I actually like to think of it more as useful rather than profitable) but my own personal opinion is that what is useful and what people get paid for have as little overlap as they've ever had, so the risk of replacing certain jobs with UBI isn't actually as much of a threat to productivity as it might seem like.
Let's say a human traffic victim shows up with a fake ID. You have to pay a check, right? Some killer shows up on payday and beats her up, along with a hundred others, and sends the money back to Haiti or the Philippines to smuggle in nerve gas or fentanyl.
Not only does that happen, that's the norm not the exception. Go live in the real world please. See what people really are like.
You don't want to do the right thing. You don't want to make things better. You don't want to even have a good time.
You want power, and be the only one who has power. You will do anything because once you stop, you have to be accountable to all your past crimes.
Easiest way to win an election? Push out voters with high standards that make you work. Bring in voters with no standards who vote because they are told.
It will prob speed up automation. Like some 40 year old with no skills is gonna suddenly re-skill and being a computer programmer? Lol.
Just gonna be a bunch of people chilling on the taxpayers dime. Reproducing, taking up space, etc.
Everything is going to be a sharp bimodal distribution. Those that are productive, get paid a ton. Those who aren't productive and just chill all day on UBI.