> There's still no answer to questions like "what if it starts to entrench a permanent underclass and make inter-generational wealth worse, as people who stop working bear a generation of people who have never worked, and they bear children, etc".
Why would reducing disincentives to work, as compared to means-tested welfare, rationally be expected to have anything like that effect?
> There are a few reasons. Firstly people getting a pittance now for job X would also get ubi, so they'd be better off.
Sure, but the value proposition of the shitty job would be lower, which would help decide in favor of stopping it altogether.
But this doesn't show how those still working would be under any less pressure, and especially less taxation.
The only way this could be improved I can imagine is by n-order effects. Some of the people who stop working would pick up some other activity that they enjoy, which would, directly or indirectly, produce some kind of riches, at least for them, at best that could be spread around society. But I don't think this can be reliably approximated beforehand.
>One argument against such programs is that they could allow people to have a lifestyle where they choose to never work, yet live a comfortable life and have lots of children. It seems like this could cause extreme population growth, but in a very bad way. Am I missing something, or is there a solution to address that problem?
So, I'm talking largely about rich nations like the USA. Here? it has been a long time since the population was restricted by food, so we can neatly sidestep that problem without resorting to Swift.
I do think it's important to design welfare programs to aid people who are leaving poverty. I personally don't think this should be done by cutting off the support if they don't work... But I do think programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit which help smooth the transition from being dependent on welfare to supporting yourself are super important...
(And I think the Earned Income Tax Credit is generally considered a good model of this; the idea is that instead of cutting out benefits as soon as a person gets a job, the government continues to supplement the income until they are doing well.
a basic income that everyone gets addresses a similar problem, and a basic income + a strongly progressive income tax could probably do something similar.
> For the vast majority of people, if they don't have to work in order to earn, most people will choose not to work. So then who supports these folks?
Those people are already being supported with fantastically expensive bureaucratic benefit systems. Sometimes those systems also act as a disincentive to return to work, trapping people on benefits, by making it impossible for them to get education or work experience or part time work.
Once you have these massive bureaucracies they sustain themselves by land-grabbing more work.
Here's one example from the UK. A man claiming benefits gets temporary work on a zero hour contract. He needs to sign off benefits, so he calls (because that how you do things now) the helpline.
"Is this position going to last longer than 5 weeks?"
He has no idea. But they will only take a yes or no answer.
He is unable to convey that he has no idea whether the job will last for more than 5 weeks or not.
For people who don't know the system it's tempting to just say "it doesn't matter, just take her suggestion and move on to the next question", but sadly the penalty for getting a question wrong (even if you've used their suggested answer) is that you have your benefits suspended or sanctioned.
> celebrating and rewarding achievement based on genuine merit as opposed to cuddling our young ones
You should reward effort, not necessarily achievement. Note that this is different to "cuddling our young ones". This is apparently especially important for smart children.
>A lot of the people who received welfare in the second or third generation often had no idea how a job works. They were late all the time or just didn't show up for a week.
I dont understand. You have seen firsthand how entitlements ruin people, and you're arguing that UBI will be good for society?
Edit: why the down votes? Are adults who do not understand the concept of a job not a problem? How else could so many of them live without this knowledge if they weren't being handed out the resources to enable them?
> I saw a post in the past that suggested a minimum income where the amount of assistance reduce as you got paid more. So if the minimum was $40k a year and you made $20k working some job you'd get $20k in subsidies. This help give some incentive to people to get jobs.
No, a dollar for dollar reduction in benefits for outside income does not "give some incentive to people to get jobs", its gives a disincentive to people to get jobs. Working has a disutility -- otherwise everyone would do it for free -- so if you have a choice of $X from a minimum guarantee with no work or $Y from work and $min((X-Y),0) in subsidies with work -- you have a net disincentive to work for any Y not greater than X by an amount sufficient to account for the disutility of work.
Benefits that reduce with income are how a lot of current programs work (and have worked for some time), which is why various complicated measures to try to combat the disincentives that structure can create have also been built into them (which further increase the administrative costs), and one of the key motivations for unconditional basic income is eliminating the problems that that causes.
> The question is how many people making 200k will, given the option, take the free 20k and not work, therefore paying no taxes.
Almost certainly the same number as are making 200k now that cease additional effort beyond what is necessary to make 20k, i.e., 0.
Probably even at lower levels more people would work (at least in the open economy paying full taxes) than dobcurrently, since pushing any clawback of benefits from the low levels and high marginal rates that they kick in with means tested benefit programs to somewhere higher on the income spectrum at a lower marginal additional rate reduces the disincentive to additional work compared to the status quo.
>> How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work?
I grew up around a lot of poor people. One issue in the US is healthcare. If you make <13k (or whatever your state limit is) you dont qualify for government healthcare. Also, 13k is too little to actually purchase private healthcare, so there is a "donut hole" where it makes sense not to work below a certain wage since you get less with income than with no income.
The solution here is obvious to me -- if you provide some of the benefits without means-testing (i.e., the "U" in "UBI") then people are incentivized to work even bits without risking losting healthcare/foodstamps.
Another example was in college -- if you earned even a bit of money, your student aid often went down commensurately. At that point, why would you work? You were no better off unless you could make a LOT of money. I realize this has changed over the past 20yrs.
Also, as someone who's gone thru this -- this is a very delicate process. You do one thing wrong, and you're in bureaucratic hell for months without benefits. The "safe" thing to do is to earn nothing -- God forbid you earn a thousand here or there and lose medical care. The whole system of means-testing makes no sense. It seems to be more a way to create jobs for bureaucrats.
> Would fewer people in the workforce really be so bad?
Yes. Someone needs to work to produce the goods and services they use, as well as fund their UBI. The more people who opt out of working, the harder everyone else must work to compensate.
> What’s the carbon and water footprint of all of these goods we really don’t need but we bust our humps for anyway?
People dropping out of the workforce doesn't reduce the demand for those goods and services. In fact, giving people free income might increase the demands for goods and services as those people would have extra disposable income.
> The problem is that the state is not capable of understanding who is disadvantaged and why.
I just said it, children and the elderly. That and a negative income tax covers most of it.
Often people do have bad ideas beyond this, mostly because they're very confused about what encourages work and what discourages it. (which is how you get SSI asset tests)
> I agree it can be hard to distinguish between the truly needy and intentional slackers. But, it would cost even more tax money to inspect harder to find out. Inspectors ain't cheap. It may be counter-intuitive, but it's sometimes cheaper to let some degree of riff-raff slip thru the cracks. The third alternative is that nobody gets anything.
That is exactly what I’ve heard and I completely agree with your statement. Although I never really meant to imply that we should have investigators follow people around and kick them off welfare.
Again, I’m not against welfare for the disabled, poor and destitute, but I also thinks it disincentivizes work to those that want to and I think though that people are disincentivized to work for economic reasons and not just social reasons. The economic reasons we can fix and the social disincentives might be able to be fixed too, but I wouldn’t think hiring inspectors is the right way to do that. For an example of economic disincentives for work in the US welfare system, if someone makes just enough money to get off of particular kinds of welfare because they got a job or even a better paying job they may end up making less which could disincentivize them from working or holding a better job. The answer as pointed out here is to ween people off of benefits in a way that would make financial sense to the individuals themselves [1].
Basically my thought with saying previously that these bad incentives can be bad for the person on welfare themselves is if we disincentivize people from climbing the job ladder above a certain rung they may feel inclined to always stay below that rung due to that incentive. Thus leading to their own poverty and thus hurting the economy as well, and this is because not only we have to continue paying their welfare, but also because they don’t contribute as much to our workforce.
I understand that for the large part of people on welfare their personal intention is to get off of it and pass that barrier/rung and get off welfare, but they still have some amount of disincentive to not do so which if the welfare program were better maybe it would have better incentives.
>Except that there are strong social incentives for anyone who is capable of getting a paying job and going off welfare to do so
Debatable. In the US, many welfare programs are designed to cut off anyone who actually gets a job...even if that job pays less than what you'd get from welfare. This problem gets even bigger as you factor in the fact that multiple welfare programs exist, making it nigh-impossible to prevent that drop from being catastrophic.
This is a major incentive to stay on welfare.
Meanwhile, with a BI, a person who seeks a job will earn more money than one who does not. That's it. No complicated math involved, not even subtraction; a guy who works will have more money than one who does not.
Assuming all the participants want more money, the second set of rules will lead to more work than the first.
> But unless the welfare bill has an astronomical amount of waste (which I don't deny may be the case), surely this redistributes welfare from those who need it to those who don't?
For replacing poverty-targetted programs, this effect is limited if its used in a system which already has an appropriate progressive income tax system, further, it makes "needing it" less durable, as it doesn't prevent gains in personal earning potential from being negated by cutbacks in benefits that create a disincentives (because the costs to realize the gains + the cutbacks do to receiving the gains mean that gaining income-before-benefits actually reduces effective income-after-benefits.)
From the article: "She found that only new mothers and teenagers worked substantially less. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies, and teenagers worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their families".
To me that sounds like more adults would work, while those who have other obligations (childbearing) or goals (study, creative, startups) can focus on that.
I'm not saying it would be cheaper, but providing a guaranteed minimum to all adults, would remove the need for the other programs, saving THAT money. It would not pay for it completely. Removing the government jobs that oversee most of the selection and verification (fact checking if the person is pursuing offers) could be eliminated. This could also save money. Again not enough, but enough to help sigificantly.
> There are a lot of logistics here.
Absolutely. We need to take risks for rewards though, and there must be a way to test this without hurting the whole economy, but we need to all agree to take that risk before we work on the next step.
> How do we prove you did not already get your check?
Great question. My guess would be you only provide one per person per period. Any duplications would be search for via software, then again by a human. Any proven duplication will be deducted. Rinse and repeat, minimal bureaucracy. The government always pays me/requires me to pay them every year, but even though its not perfect, it works for the most part.
> Is the basic income adjusted for families of 1 vs 7?
In my mind it would be a set amount per adult. The argument that we need to provide more for larger families creates odd and sad circumstances of child farms and generational welfare homes. People need to start becoming responsible for their families. We'd still have child services. Besides, this shouldn't be comfortable for a single mother living alone who isn't working. These people can get family or charity to help them, not taxes. It SHOULD be comfortable for a single mother working 15 hours a week though, which would help a lot of people out there.
> This idea of a minimalist ruleset for financial assistance seems like it is great at first, but will inevitably just get more and more bloated (and costly) as you actually implement it.
Well, you could argue are current system will only get more bloated and costly as well (which is has). A major reform is necessary eventually, and this is an innovative and modern potential solution we should SERIOUSLY investigate past talking and move towards researching through small implementations.
> Who will pay for these jobs? Here is where the enormous wealth concentrated in relatively few hands comes in. It strikes me as unavoidable that large chunks of the money created by A.I. will have to be transferred to those whose jobs have been displaced. This seems feasible only through Keynesian policies of increased government spending, presumably raised through taxation on wealthy companies.
This proposed solution seems okay in the short term (a social safety net) but over the long term it makes it sound like humans supported in this means are pets.
> The government will not only have to subsidize most people’s lives and work; it will also have to compensate for the loss of individual tax revenue previously collected from employed individuals.
The above does not sound like a sustainable situation. How can a small part of the population support the rest of the population completely? I can not imagine that lasting for that long until something changes in some unforeseen way.
> Are those people you mention actually productive now?
Well, kind of, but only enough to pay rent and eat.
But that's my point, individuals like this, who only work the bare minimum to just keep existing and have no drive or motivation to achieve more, are very likely to just not work anymore at all since their basic needs are now provided.
At the moment, they at least work somewhat. This helps keep local businesses running (even if just barely). With a BI, these folks stop all production and resort to their ideal lifestyle of not doing anything.
It's a little naive to think these individuals will suddenly change in light of all this new-found free time, and run out to create businesses or new things.
We can examine lottery jackpot winners for evidence of what many people would do if they didn't have to worry about money anymore (they do nothing in large part).
I just don't see any scenario where a BI leads to increased productivity like what is being claimed.
In contrast, I can foresee unemployment rates increasing, as fewer individuals participate in the workforce at all (to no determent of themselves, since their standard of living is provided free of cost). This will ultimately put strain on the system since not enough production is happening to offset this behavior, which will lead to drastic measures like dramatically increasing tax rates more and more.
I just don't buy the argument that giving someone a free living without any expectation of productivity in return will lead to a net increase in productivity.
>They're pretty clear that this is about punishing indigence.
But why? Are they doing so so they want to oppress poor people? Or are they doing so to make the welfare experience shitty so people are incentivized to seek normal employment?
>If welfare is removed you are assuming that people's lives would not be worse because _eventually_ companies would be forced to raise their wages. In the short, medium, and even long term if the companies we're done headed enough, people's lives would be worse off because they would lack the welfare _and_ employers would not have adapted wages to the new equilibrium.
This concern could be alleviated by phasing out welfare over time rather than instantaneously removing it. I feel like you dodged the spirit of the question, so I'll ask it again. Ignoring UBI as a possibility, given the world as you understand it today where welfare is a subsidy for shareholders, do you support removing welfare so that we can stop subsidizing the wealthy?
UBI vs welfare doesn't really change the situation here. UBI may be more economically efficient than our current form of welfare, but that's a different discussion altogether. I'm only interested in the question of whether you really believe that welfare as it stands today is a subsidy for shareholders. Because if you believe that, then it seems the rational proposal would be to get rid of welfare.
> The core question of basic income is: if people work, do they lose it entirely?
Usually basic income is intended to be irrespective of any other income source. This article about Finland states the same.
It's the key difference from other kind of welfare.
The other being that you don't have to prove and thus nobody has to check anything.
By removing the marginal disincentives it gives the ability to accept any job opportunity, no matter how temporary, non continuous or whatever; you can only gain
by doing something.
It's not clear how this would affect the whole society. Especially since now everybody has X bucks more, will the prices go up for everybody, thus excluding the poorer and thus making the system counterproductive ?
> Think of basic welfare as a utility, to draw upon as and when you need it, hopefully temporarily as you get back on your feet.
That's a not-entirely-unreasonable (though, still, I'd argue basically flawed) idea for welfare in an economy that is heavily labor dependent and in which the presumption that being jobless is a short-term, transitional situation and where the share of output going to labor (as opposed to capital) is relatively high.
One of the reasons I think ideas like BI have been catching on more recently is that it is increasingly obvious that the economy is, to the extent it ever was like that in outline, increasingly moving away from it and not likely to return to it.
> Incentives to be productive don't go away
With a guaranteed floor rather than guaranteed addition, yes, within a certain range incentives to be productive go away, because any gains up to the amount of the guaranteed floor have zero net return to the person producing them.
Why would reducing disincentives to work, as compared to means-tested welfare, rationally be expected to have anything like that effect?
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