You could get decent results in less than 60-80 years by granting each participant a fully-funded fixed annuity guaranteeing them a specific income for the remainder of their lives independent of the continuation of the study. Of course, that would raise the cost of the study to something approaching a real (non-universal) BI program.
Maybe the simple solution is that the researchers establish a dedicated million dollar bank account for a participant and automatically withdraw $1000 for the participant every month.
UBI is a political decision which is renewed with every government.
The perspective of the participants makes sense. Whether they believe their access to UBI will continue or not, it makes sense to up-skill.
Besides, we do know how people behave when they are born with a million dollar bank account, and it's relatively very rare that they are criticised for how they choose to live.
If this is true than implementing UBI will be more problematic than I thought. All UBI proposals so far call for all other financial safety nets to be removed in order to finance UBI. Managing that will be a nightmare if you can just cut off UBI, then you have to spin up everything else again. I imagine UBI to be something similar to how the pension system is, once in place it stays there forever-ish (meaning that it can potentially collapse).
"we do know how people behave when they are born with a million dollar bank account, and it's relatively very rare that they are criticised for how they choose to live" - that's an excellent point.
The knock on effect is that it'd likely reduce funding for other safety nets because they have an inherent safety net in UBI. But the existing welfare programs are either highly prohibitive or extremely difficult to qualify for and maintain even if you should be using them. UBI eliminates that barrier of entry if you only need 1k a month (using Yangs plan here).
So, yeah, less people would likely use food stamps because they can get more from 1k a month than from 1.2k in food stamps. Most people do not qualify for that much in food stamps as it is. With fewer people using that program, the government would funnel less money to that program, reducing net costs and allowing more money to go elsewhere. Eventually this would likely lead to the end of that program.
This could allow us to create new social programs that are more focused. With fewer people requiring other social safety nets, the new ones that are created would require less funding and can address root cause issues vs symptoms which are what we address today.
Most people just need money. A minority of people using a social welfare programs need something significantly more than just money. We should not leave those people on the street, but Yang never planned on that happening. He proposed a VAT tax to cover the costs. Whether that would actually work or not is debatable, but that was his plan.
So I guess that suggests that even if a UBI is implemented that it could be cut or repealed in a future government.
The benefit isn't shared by everyone, though. The payouts may be equal but the taxes to support those payouts are not. If a majority of voters are paying more in taxes than they receive in payouts (as is likely) then it shouldn't be hard to sell them on the idea that reducing or dismantling the program would be in their own self-interest.
On the other hand, if it would be difficult to dismantle the program even knowing that it benefits a vocal minority at the expense of the majority, that should make us think twice about instituting it in the first place.
It does very little to test economics. Perhaps UBI leads to a lot of people deciding to tend bar at the local tennis club, volunteering for the job. Maybe introducing UBI across a large area has marked effects on gym memberships.
Those seem easier to test if you put a large area on UBI for a short-ish term (though I admit I haven't seen any UBI research that analyses such social effects - perhaps somebody knows of some?)
Is that anything but conjecture? I see a study showing that UBI is a "good thing", and you didn't provide a source for your reasoning.
Edit: to all those saying that the parent comment is straightforward, or common sense, or whatever, it's not straightforward or common sense because I disagree that UBI would be a failure. No one knows what would happen under UBI, but these types of studies give some evidence as to what is going to happen.
Everyone saying the parent is correct is basically similar to saying we should stop studying fusion because it's common sense we'll never achieve it (there are people who say that, too).
It's a good first step to study this, at least, and goes to show we need to test UBI on a greater scale.
However it's not a stretch at all to say people will act different when they're temporarily receiving money than when they'll receive it 'forever'.
No citation is needed for straightforward observations.
All human behaviors are affected by knowing that something is going to end soon or not.
Yet, UBI is often held under strict scrutiny. While the status quo is not challenged in the same way.
I understand it's much more stressful than permanent guaranteed UBI, but it's truer to the real intent of UBI (which I believe is reducing the friction when deciding to try new job or state or whatever in a pursuit of self-actualization).
Yes it does, statistically speaking.
Career academics are a tiny minority of the population. The median salary of a BS degree in the US is 2x over non-degree holders. The median salary of an advanced degree is 3x. Twice the salary for having a 4 year degree, that is enormous.
These stats were published very recently by the St. Louis Fed: https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/revie...
Before I saw the statistics I would not have believed the difference is anywhere near as large as 2x.
The average person who is capable of getting a Bachelor’s degree but doesn’t is very distant from the average high school graduate. And if you drop out of college after two years because you can’t cut it your labour market outcome is only very slightly better than a high school grad but your debt load of half of a college grad.
But, I’m curious, what does it actually matter in this context, if any non-zero portion of it is causation? This thread is discussing whether people are better off getting some education, whether they should spend their UBI income in search of opportunity via education, and whether going to school is a “work disincentive”. (Seem like the opposite to me.) They’re attempting to improve their lot via schooling, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that more education will, statistically, improve their lot at least somewhat.
Some of education’s pay off is privately and socially useful, increases in human capital, some of it is privately useful but socially useless or counter productive, wasteful signaling in an arms race, like that which leads to people who would have stopped with a Bachelor’s a generation ago getting a Master’s now.
Insofar as education is socially wasteful we should discourage it, not encourage it, tax it, not subsidize it.
What is your metric of social waste, and why do you think education has enough to worry about compared all the millions of other socially wasteful things we do when not working?
Us GDP per capita is not going down, and education rates are going up. Both monotonically since the 70s, despite the supposed degree requirements of bank tellers. That alone — the economy — seems to squarely contradict the notion that school is somehow bad for us.
If you’re measuring social productivity in terms of capital, I think you’re failing to account for the increase in income tax the government receives from the average 2x higher salary of educated people. That extra income tax is so much money, it could fund education for every man, woman, and child in the US, and still have 90% of it left for the socially productive spending we do now on such things as maintaining the military industrial complex. We are being taxed for education already, and we are still better off.
It seems like you might also be ignoring the social evidence for education in countries where it is subsidized, like Norway, Finland and others.
If you give everyone a Bachelor’s degree they will not become 2x as productive. The people are different. The education is less important than the difference in the people. Education is not making them that much more productive. It’s certifying them as already being more productive.
The evidence for the economic effects of evidence is really weak. Richer countries spend more on education but the extra spending on education follows the getting rich, not the other way round. Ghana is a lot more educated now than 1950’s France, and a lot poorer. China’s massive economic growth from the 1980’s to the 2000s was based on a populace that mostly hadn’t finished primary school.
Regarding other first world countries the US is far, far richer than them[1] and has a better education system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...
How do you measure productivity? And (asking again, since you didn’t answer) how do you measure social waste? Where is the evidence of your claims?
If what you claimed is true, then if the rate of education were to go up, then the income premium for education would go down, because you’re saying the income premium is correlation and not causation of education’s effect on society. But education rates have been going up for the last 50 years and the income premium for education is stable, despite more people being educated. Why?
> Richer countries spend more on education but the extra spending on education follows the getting rich, not the other way around
Your argument is that education is an economic drain. Where is the evidence of that? Even if true that wealth precedes education (and citation is needed there), your argument here is contradicting your earlier argument that education is socially wasteful - countries are getting richer and staying richer with increased education rates, regardless of whether it’s causation or correlation.
Ghana is an outlier with political issues not representative of most of the world, it doesn’t prove much about education. China’s massive economic growth coincides with an increase in education, framing it as being “based” on an uneducated populace because their education rate was lower at the start seems like it’s dodging the inconvenient fact that their education rates have risen while their economy has grown? Why are you so convinced that education is not even part of the cause for their economic growth, or anyone else’s?
You seem to be claiming that education teaches nothing of economic value, does not help people personally gain any skills, does not help people improve their productivity? Is that what you’re saying, and if so why?
That's the entire point. We can't quantify if education actually makes people more productive and if it does, is that productivity applied to helping or hurting society. For example, an aspiring software dev could get educated in computer science which would increase their productivity (provided they actually learned something which is not a given). However, they could become a white or black hat hacker with differing effects on society. Another scenario is that a person doesn't know what they want to do and so they take a variety of courses until they find something they like. A lot of that education is wasted energy that doesn't help anyone if they can't use it.
If you define educational productivity as GDP or income, or in financial terms, then the evidence is pretty clear and very strong that education doesn’t hurt. For education to not improve “productivity”, then you must be defining productivity some other way that you’re expecting me to intuit. I’m only hearing some rationalizing for why you’re ignoring the data we actually have.
The Fed study I posted does attempt to quantify the causal effect of education, and so do quite a few other studies. I recommend doing some research about what has been done to find out how this issue has been quantified already. I have looked into quite a few of these studies and their methodologies, and I haven’t seen a single one claim that education has zero or negative causal effect, even when their summary leans toward the income premium being more correlation than causation. All of them conclude it’s a mix, and there’s a positive contribution from the act of attending school, learning history and skills, gaining independence, etc. I don’t think education is by any means 100% efficient, whatever that would even mean, but claiming it’s zero or negative is really extreme, especially if you can’t produce any evidence.
The only thing that betters society is the positive application of knowledge to creating something of value for others. It's not enough to learn a topic, you must actually apply it make a difference.
> The only thing that betters society is the positive application of knowledge
To apply knowledge, you have to first acquire it. How do you propose to do so without education?
Education conveys benefits besides merely financial: a technician might receive no financial benefit from knowing about DNA, nuclear fission and distance to Mars. However, these people make life choices informed by their general knowledge, they vote on policy, they act when Covid-19 is in the news.
If we take your perspective far enough, we will have a society of idiot savants that are clueless outside if their narrow speciality.
Eventually we'll look back at college (including trades) education being free like we look now on elementary education being free.
We're talking about institutional education, not gaining more information. So in this discussion we're not talking about people spending their money to become more informed on Kardashians. We're talking about them going to school. As far as I'm aware, there's no school that teaches the history of the Kardashians.
At any rate, I believe the poster you responded to was using hyperbole to equate "history of the Kardashians" with some degree that he or she deems "equally as useless."
Instead of the usual "basket weaving" as an example of a useless field of study, he used "history of the Kardashians."
Try reasoning from the other end: is a society of uneducated people likely to be successful in the 21st century?
Parent said
> First: All studies so far show a pretty consistent ~10% work disincentive. This is what all the detractors say when they say it disincentivizes work. So how about this one? From actually reading the study's conclusion:
>> Slightly less than one-fifth were employed before but unemployed during the pilot (17%)
> So even worse than what we've seen so far. 17% dropping out of the labor market when its a short-term study is huge.
Child comment proved this to be misleading. I myself was misled. Anyone reading this would think that this study showed that UBI disincentivizes work. Child comment showed that this conclusion does not follow from the study.
You can speculate all you want on what permanent UBI would do but what the parent comment said is absolutely a misrepresentation of the study.
Parent was correct in quoting the study. 17% were unemployed. What were they doing instead? Studying, or not working (with a small minority on sick leave).
From this we can conclude that: UBI encourages people to leave the workforce, or this study encouraged people to leave the workforce. Studying is still a productivity activity in the right context, but you cannot pretend it is the same as being employed from the perspective of analysing the economic impacts of UBI.
Parent framed their argument as
> All studies so far show a pretty consistent ~10% work disincentive. This is what all the detractors say when they say it disincentivizes work.
When the parent invokes the detractors, it brings up the arguments that all the detractors use, saying that UBI will turn people into lazy freeloaders that do not want to work. That it will lead to people just living off the government and contributing nothing. Going back to get an education for the purpose of work does not fall under that category.
The thesis of the parent is not that they're simply leaving the workforce. They're quoting the same old claims that UBI will make people lazy and not want to work. That frame is why quoting the study as a means to further that claim is so misleading.
You assumed a lot about the parent comment's interpretation. "Disincentivizing work" can be interpreted to mean more likely to study than work. This doesn't mean lazy. Nothing in the parent comment called people lazy for leaving the workforce, just that it disincetivized participating in the workforce.
> You assumed a lot about the parent comment's interpretation. "
No I did not. That the THE primary argument detractors make when they say that UBI disincentivizes work. Read enough on the arguments against UBI and you will realize that for yourself.
Your interpretation indicates that you have not been steeped in debates about UBI, otherwise you would know this already.
Interpreting the parent's remarks, ESPECIALLY when they bring up the existing "detractors" as simply meaning "not working", instead of what is the primary argument the existing detractors make is absolutely disingenuous.
> No I did not. That the THE primary argument detractors make when they say that UBI disincentivizes work. Read enough on the arguments against UBI and you will realize that for yourself.
"If you've read enough comments, you can predict the arguments people use. So I wasn't assuming anything."
"If in an argument, someone brings up the people that debate policy and write essays on it and they invoke them and the conclusion of their argument, a reader can choose to interpret that someone as having a different argument than those people that policy debaters they invoked and that's completely legitimate".
Yea OP totally was referring to internet comments instead of politicians or people in think tanks that debate policy, especially given that they quote statistics from studies, when they wrote "detractors" /s
I like the concept too, but we have to be careful what we wish for.
If, somehow, UBI becomes real there will be a huge push from the libertarians and far-right to dismantle whatever is left of the social safety net. They actually would love the idea of replacing medicare, social security and other programs with a quick 1000/month that would enable even more shrinking of government.
At the end of the day it's the most direct and effective way of combating poverty and goes a long way towards closing the wealth gap. Especially when we can divert those funds from corporations into the hands of the people.
I do generally favor shrinking the government but not at the expense of the people's safety, liberty or well-being.
Where do you think all this Income is going to come from? The middle class will shoulder the bulk of it which will widen the wealth gap. You will end up with 1k in UBI and 1500 in taxes to pay for it.
So I'm not sure why you think the middle class will shoulder the bulk of the cost. Do you think $150k/yr earners ($300k/yr families) are middle class? The median household income int he US (2018) was $62k/yr[1]
[0] https://ubicalculator.com/
[1] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
It's all very well and good to say "look, virtually everyone would see a net income increase!" until you realize that's only possible by literally just printing money.
The costs of such high deficit spending are pretty certain, but the benefits meant to offset those costs are only speculative (and highly speculative, at that).
Though I'm also not an economist and lots of economists seem to like deficit spending. So I'm just going to say I'm naive here.
I get that one of the benefits of UBI is that it's supposed to empower people to use the money in the way that satisfies their needs best, rather than rely on inefficient bureaucracies to determine what needs are worth subsidizing and who qualifies.
The problem is, there's no free lunch. It seems to me like any sensibly funded UBI is going to probably negatively impact many middle-class folks. Politically that's just a non-starter in the U.S.
I still do not buy the argument that a UBI will be shouldered by the middle class. I have yet to see evidence that it will be shouldered by anyone but the 1% (really the 0.01%).
Let's not try and justify bad ideas by pointing out that people currently do bad things.
As I mentioned:
> divert those funds from corporations into the hands of the people
To be fair, it's true that won't cover the entire bill. However, between reducing spending in other welfare programs, the increase in economic output and implementing a VAT, the gap closes pretty quickly.
As a sibling comment mentions, the math is pretty straightforward. Let's also not forget the second- and third-order benefits to society and the economy that will result from most of the population having more purchasing power and economic freedom.
Do you think it's fine that Amazon and friends pay next to nothing in taxes by exploiting the tax code? Why are we (taxpayers) subsidizing mega corps who are making money hand over fist?
>> divert those funds from corporations into the hands of the people
There's a limit to how much you can tax corporations until they just up and leave. Just ask Sweden in the 70's.
> To be fair, it's true that won't cover the entire bill. However, between reducing spending in other welfare programs, the increase in economic output and implementing a VAT, the gap closes pretty quickly.
All UBI programs I've seen also require deficit spending. And good luck canceling other welfare programs.
> Let's also not forget the second- and third-order benefits to society and the economy that will result from most of the population having more purchasing power and economic freedom.
People will have more dollars, but between increased taxes and inflation from deficit spending, I'm very suspect that people will have more purchasing power.
> Do you think it's fine that Amazon and friends pay next to nothing in taxes by exploiting the tax code? Why are we (taxpayers) subsidizing mega corps who are making money hand over fist?
I have no idea what Amazon should pay in any moral sense, but I'm fine with taxing them more so long as
1) A marginal increase in tax rates would increase net revenues (and not drive jobs/business offshore)
2) The increase in tax revenue was for a compelling public interest (not merely because "they're not paying their fair share") OR because it involved closing a tax exemption that was not available to their competitors (so that the market stays competitive)
Why is that the assumption?
Social security should be replaced with privately held accounts, just like superannuation in Australia. But in the transition people would need to be paid out their entitlement. So no problem there.
But if UBI replaced all normal welfare (excluding disability etc) is that such a bad thing? As long as the UBI is high enough and indexed to cost of living, welfare that’s broadly targeted at the poor should be unnecessary. Not just unnecessary, it tends to have the effect of making poverty stickier. Any time benefits are inversely tied to how well you're doing, you reduce the incentive to do better.
Part of the problem is that some welfare is not about the money, but the support. UBI is less likely to help someone with mental issues than someone who hates working at 7/11 while studying. Generalised, UBI likely helps those who have an impermanent problem over those that have longer term issues.
Society likely would still need welfare services for those people who struggle with the multiple travails of existence.
Personally, I'm less interested in UBI in the first world, where welfare is pretty good already and the negative affects are unknown and complicated. I'm more interested in what affect it would have on the third world, where the downsides - disincentives to work etc - seem far less of an issue. https://www.givedirectly.org/ubi-study/ is a good example.
I would assume social programs, mental health support, addictions support, job training etc. would still be around with a UBI.
I'm also pretty sure that is the case in almost all countries, where welfare is all money spent on, well, looking after people in some way?
Is that your stance?
Your stance is coming across like “more government is intrinsically better”
Is that what you are hoping I take from reading what you wrote?
Nothing wrong with that. The government is severely bloated. Also nothing wrong with reducing or replacing horrid, administratively wasteful, degrading, stigmatized, means-tested social safety nets with UBI.
Yes. People who are on means-tested social safety nets are subject to these test which often make you feel degraded. They often make people fear they will lose their benefit. And in many cases they encourage people not to improve their lives (e.g. I better not take that part-time job, because then I will lose unemployment benefits.) It also creates an incentive to falsify information so that you can continue to receive said benefit.
UBI solves all that because it isn't means-tested, you just get it no matter what (Oh you improved your situation? You got a job, got healthy, etc. That's great! You will continue to get UBI.)
But I do think that is is an overstated concern __because__ most welfare recipients are already receiving less assistance. Btw, there's capitalist oriented arguments for single payer options that libertarians are in favor of (tldr: health care operates under a network effect and single payer can minimize individual and public costs).
Regarding "sickness", the severity is important to know. If UBI enables people with slight depression issues to just give up working entirely, UBI could be entirely counterproductive by accelerating depression's spirals of inactivity.
And this completely ignored the issue of inflation that comes with society wide UBI.
The whole notion of UBI is nonsense. Rather than throwing money at people to spend on broken institutions like Education and Healthcare, let's reform these institutions in the first place to make them more affordable and effective.
Who gave this strict definition. In my opinion, the point of UBI is to benefit society. I do think people being more educated benefits society as a whole, and thus I think people using their UBI on this is beneficial.
Perhaps if you're a person who looks at your cleaners or servers or cashiers as people with no potential for self-betterment; as people who are unable to expand their horizons.
Ugh.
I’m not sure education is a very high-resolution or effective signal for much, and I think its dilution as a signal would help force us to find a better one. I’m curious though, given how self-assured you seem: what do you think education signals right now?
We need to create better options for students. We can do this by refocusing education on learning practical skills for real world jobs rather than maintaining an educational system built upon a foundation over 1000 years old that up until 100 or so years ago was intended for the elites and scholars, not the average person looking for a job.
A lot of our education - practical or otherwise - may be useless fluff, or even ideologically biased. But that's mostly not because of the chosen discipline.
That is YOUR OPINION of what UBI should be. It happens to be wrong.
What people do with the money isn't the point of UBI at all. The point is to improve their lives, and boost the economy. Who cares what specific the money is spent on if it is making people healthier, less stressed, and happier?
And here, in one sentence, is why we will NEVER see UBI in the United States of America. There is no ability to be the moral whip and maintain control over someone else's choices to make sure they don't 'waste my money'. Therefore, it will never happen.
In the US, at least, it's not about doing what's right. It's not about making sure people are healthier, less stressed, and happier. It's about making sure they live the 'best' life they can, as defined by groups like the "moral majority".
OK sure pal. UBI will happen without question in the USA. Probably in 2024.
What a twisted way to phrase "train for their next career step, which will make them earn more money, so the state gets more tax money than before"
But for you, it's always "vanity adventures" when it's other people's education, right?
What if it enables those same people to take the time off work they need to treat their depression? Getting help takes enormous energy that a depressed person likely doesn't have if they're spending all their energy just trying to survive.
Here are some actual quote from the study:
> Ten respondents moved from unemployment to employment while 32 moved from employment to unemployment. Of the participants who moved from employment to unemployment, 13 (40.6%) enrolled in full-time education during the pilot with the intention of re-entering the labour market later as more qualified workers.
Almost half of people who stopped working did it in order to train for a better job. That's great!
> most of the respondents who were unemployed during the pilot reported experiencing health issues that made it difficult or impossible for them to work.
Receiving BI allowed sick people to not be forced into work to pay for a basic existence? That's great!
Take into account those two factors and almost no able bodied, employable person opted to not work.
Sounds like a success to me.