Rather, people who “didn’t earn it.”

In fact, during COVID, an increase to the child tax portion of the EITC reduced childhood poverty by _70%_ at a relatively low cost. Guess why we don't do that anymore?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit#/medi...

https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/expirat...

(US focused even though the article is Canada lol)

People are always going to care about different things. Some really care that everyone has clean water, others a good education, others freedom of expression. Some care more about their families, while others apply equal empathy to every stranger, cow, and tree. When you forcibly take money from someone, and use it to fund your project, it comes from a place of very selective empathy. The proper way to fund your projects is to get everyone on board. Frame it so they see how it helps them achieve their goals, not just yours.

(Now, I know I'm ignoring that some people are just incredibly selfish; more accurately, some people's hearts are bleeding out on the floor, some are calcified into stone, and most are somewhere in between. I'm ignoring this discrepancy because 1. even very selfish people can get on board with welfare (like primary/secondary education), as long as it's framed properly, and 2. if a system relies on self-sacrifice, it's too easy to hijack that sacrifice into someone else's pet project.)

For example, with education, you can point out how much more economic activity is available when everyone knows how to read and write. I think the argument that actually worked, though, was "how can we avoid roving bands of teenagers in our city once we enact some child-labor laws?" (that's probably the reason highschool is compulsory, not just free to enroll in). For a universal basic income, you probably need to approach it from an entropy argument. The capitalist system tries to maximize GDP, but physical systems actually maximize the free energy (GDP - temperature * Theil index [entropy]). The capitalist system avoids this by artificially restricting free trade: for example, your boss makes a dollar, while you make a dime. There's fewer trades that could happen than if, say, you both made 55 cents (unless your boss is just reallly good at doing things with money). Or, more fundamental, your boss needs you much less than you need a salary. You have less freedom of movement than he has to remove you. A universal basic income fixes this entropy problem, which makes trades more frequent and the market more competitive. In the end, it can come around to help even a seflish centimillionaire.

Please don't use regional accents as an epithet.

That’s a generous interpretation of the results. This was a short term pilot and over one quarter of respondents stopped working, despite knowing it was a temporary program.

There is no reason to believe this analogy you're attempting to make would transfer to something like a negative tax rate

There is a big difference in getting a guaranteed income in your 20’s vs your 60’s.

In your 20’s it unlocks taking big risks and swing for the fences. YC bets in this, for example. What can ambitious kids do when they don’t need to worry about money?

But when you’ve been grinding for 40 years … yeah for sure most people stop working.

Gee why would they stop working, you think?

> And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained?

Technology gives us massive gains in productivity; we could reasonably reduce working hours to <20/week in the developed world. We might have less business dynamic analysts or scrum masters or social media coordinators. We'll be fine.

This feels like a bizarre take on quite a different arrangement.

That demographic has planned for ~40 years for tha transition, and in many cases is strongly encouraged by their industry / government / superannuation scheme, etc - to stop working at that age.

Extrapolating that back to providing a safety net to 20-40yo's just seems to miss everything about UBI - unless it's a 'I didn't have this, so no one else should' position?

All the research we're seeing - in very small, time-boxed, precarious trials - indicate that we'll probably get a positive result out of implementing this more broadly, without a drop-dead date attached.

The counter-argument always seems to be 'Oh, but we might not...' (and then some opinions).

oh well that's cuz they're retired.

These aren’t comparable at all. UBI programs would start at adulthood and not require any work. Someone receiving a retirement pension has put in many years of work.

I also think that the monetary system is inherently imperfect. To put it mildly.

It is structurally unfixable and there is no possible utopia within it. Last, there is no other good option that I know of.

But pensions are not Basic Income, thank goodness. They're a payment into an investment fund that grows as lifetime earned income grows. They're an asset, exactly the same as a business is an asset.

In fact, pension funds invest in businesses.

Whether or not that fund is well managed is another discussion. Moreover, most people in the United States (at least) do not get pensions aside from a minimal social security payment. Which was also paid into a fund.

Working is only individually valuable when there are good jobs, or to fend off starvation.

What working is not is an immutable positive value that any de facto sweat shop owner can claim to offer the opportunity for.

At a certain point the social contract is broken and working becomes something, at the least, that is not virtuous to offer nor to fulfill. Except insofar as one's personal survival needs are concerned.

When there are only terrible jobs, then society should not feel morally compelled to work them. Especially when it has other income. And especially when a concurrent social value is to drop wages and benefits through the floor, by any means necessary.

For the sake of virtue, are business owners working underpaid second jobs "for the system"?

Are successful business owners widely coming out of retirement to work "for the sake of the system"?

We're not talking about volunteering at the old age home. We're talking about a real work schedule.

Society may have to work those jobs out of necessity, but they can and should tell people trying to morally shame them with a "come out of retirement and to work attitude" to go copulate with themselves.

Especially when the social contract between employers and employees is long-shattered beyond repair.

In society, there can be low paying jobs alongside well paying jobs. What there can't be is moralizing combined with decades of illegal shenanigans whose sole purpose is to suppress wages / job security (especially due to wages) and undermine working conditions.

"Productivity". Give us a break.

Unless your payment is compelling enough to get me to work, as a retired person the health of your business is not my morality nor my productivity. Your business is yours, and mine is my own.

Are those business owners going to come and "be productive" by cleaning my gutters after work? Are they going to "be productive" by doing my taxes?

>And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained?

That may be the most communist mindset I've ever seen written out on this forum.

Being a WalMart floor employee is not a virtuous contribution to the system, above being retired. It's an agreement, for a certain wage, to be a part of the employee pool of the Walton family's for-profit vehicle.

Would it be virtuous to come out of retirement and work that job if it paid nothing?

Should the Walton's pay every red cent of their profit to employees, make nothing themselves, and run their business regardless and for the sake of the system?

The virtue is one's monetary needs, and the Walton's have to pay enough to meet the social contract requirement to maintain enough employees in their employee pool. If they don't have enough employees, then they aren't meeting the unspoken requirement. No amount of moralizing / whining is going to increase their social virtue. Only cash on-offer will.

Joe's construction or accounting business is not "the system" either. It's Joe's income vehicle. Retired people have their own income vehicles.

If the employer-employee relationship is a social contract, and not slavery, then working is no more "for the system" then making a profit is.

And if both are needed to "sustain the system", and the business owner can't draw enough people to work via a pay package, then the answer is to bring them in as partners.

If both are for the benefit of the system, and one person is going to be morally compelled to work, and another is going to be morally compelled to make a profit, and the pay isn't high enough to compel the employee, then they need to be made a profit partner in the business.

When I hear someone whining that they are worried about having enough workforce, I think that they are exhausting their vocabulary to avoid stating that they're too cheap to pay employees enough for the job.

I'm not saying that they have to be compelled to pay a minimum wage. Offer $1 an hour for all I would care. As long as the other side of that isn't to illegally / immorally undermine the labor pool.

But the other side of that is if they aren't paying enough to draw employees, then the "I'm going to employ people" part of their business is not viable.

The other side of it is not "people are too over-benefitted / over-privileged to work".

If you want someone to join a social contract, then you have to make a compelling enough offer. That's our only "system".

Anything else needs to be a partnership / significant enough profit split.

When the pay is rock-bottom, employees are scarce, and those profit shares are eventually legally compelled because "oh no, the system", then it's formal communism.

When the employees are legally compelled without partnerships, then its slavery.

Is that true?

I mean, the best comparison to this wouldn't be some kind of pension system. It would be the universal guaranteed income we already have. Yes, we guarantee every citizen a minimum income...as long as they are over 65 :-)

Most of them would probably keep working in some capacity if they didn't lose their benefits.

I think it's a fair question, and as an economist the topic fascinates me far beyond the typical econ 101 perfect world hand waving.

Is that true - or is that your belief?

I feel like if UBI guaranteed that I wouldn't be homeless and starve to death - but did not guarantee me avocado for my toast - I wouldn't stop working.

I can't say that for sure, but a lot of the subjective concerns expressed by people about UBI seem to think that it provides the proverbial four-bedroom-house-in-suburbia-with-two-cars-and-an-overseas-holiday-each-year, which might in fact reduce the eagerness for someone to travel two hours a day to sit in a small box and bang away at a keyboard for a third their waking life.

The B in UBI stands for Basic.

If you gave me a $basicIncome raise I’d keep working; but I’d appreciate the cash.

If you guaranteed $basicIncome for life I’d restructure my life around that, and likely FIRE.

I quit my job. A handful of my coworkers did the same.

Most people, when given the chance to stop working, they stop. Just look at pensioners, including those who get a pension at 50. The vast majority simply stop working.

I believe previous UBI experiments have shown the same results: most people keep working, some people stop, but they usually have decent reasons. Education, extending parental leave, or being a caregiver aren't necessarily things we want to discourage if they result in a greater return.

I would also point out that there's a difference between a full UBI, a modest partial UBI, and the kind of "basic income" that's not universal and goes away at a rate of 50c on the dollar when you earn more, like in this study. You can't slowly roll out a full UBI, but that's definitely possible for a partial UBI or a means-tested cash payment. You can dial the amount down as far as you want and still study the impact.

(1) You are correct that you cannot test UBI in a petri dish. It has to be all or nothing to see the REAL effects.

(2) If you rework UBI to be a negative income tax and remove all of government subsidies and handouts then it would have much less potential for disastrous economic impact (see Milton Friedman[0])

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

So already something like half of our lives are covered by some kind of UBI. 20 years to mature, 20 years of retirement, sandwiching a 30-40 year career.

Don't forget, UBI would replace everything else. Food stamps, unemployment benefits, social security, etc etc. And literally SQUARE MILES of office building staffing bureaucrats who do means testing, fraud prevention, etc etc for government benefits would also not be required.

If you put together all of the money we spend for all of that, I wouldn't be surprised if 90%, or even 100% of the cost of a UBI could be covered.

another POV is, libertarians have empathy, it's quixotic, so how can it be harnessed to achieve your goals?

Because those are vastly less efficient, create traps where people can't afford to increase their income, and ultimately divide the population and tend to get dismantled.

How do you provide minimum wage jobs that are not soul-crushing, without destroying the private sector soul-crushing minimum wage jobs?

How do you even find productive jobs people would want to do (or at least find tolerable) that no-one in the private sector was willing to pay minimum wage to get done?

How do you provide jobs to a wide range of contextual needs, from ages 16 to 65, office workers to labourers, physical and mental impairment, neurodivergence, ability to travel, etc? How do you fund the administrative burden of matching jobs to people?

What do you do for the people who still cannot work for various reasons - total disability, caring for another, etc. You still need provide a wide gamut of social welfare programs for different needs and circumstances, with its concomitant bureaucratic cost and inefficiency - or let people starve, or give them "jobs" that have no productive output, just performative burdens.

What's the actual upside of guaranteed employment programs over a UBI?

"New UBI study is designed to demonstrate that productivity will increase with payments"

and then after the results are released.

"UBI study confirms that participants were happier and healthier on a UBI"

Are you counting this study in that world, given that it wasn't a UBI study? It was intended to be a continuation of the Manitoban study from the 1970s, which wasn't modelled as UBI either.

Half of those people stopped working so that they could go to school.

I'd also expect an even better result if working did not cancel out the UBI.

Disabled people receive benefits because their ability to work is impeded by their disability and thus those programs don't have the same potential to disincentive work among the disabled population.

Retirement benefits do diminish older people's labor participation rates. That's the intended purpose of retirement programs. Society agrees that at a certain age people should ideally be able to relax and not work if they don't want to. Why do people protest when countries raise their retirement age? Because people don't want to have to work in their 70s or late 60s. Some do (my dad kept consulting for the fun of it), but they're probably in the minority.