The examples I'm thinking of are government hiring and procurement, where there are all kinds of hoops to jump through to show fairness (God forbid someone gets hired because the hiring manager wants to work with them, or a vendor gets selected because they have built a relationship with those using their services).
In my opinion it's a side-effect of having money to distribute, but having votes as the only forcing function and no economic feedback. So the pressure is to not appear to be giving anyone an advantage, even if it costs in quality of outcomes and bureaucratic overhead.
Of course it seems hard to separate "the hiring manager wants to work with them [because they are a great vendor]" from "the hiring manager wants to work with them because they pay for the hiring manager's kids' school and family vacation" without adequate documentation.
Like you allude to, I think we need to look more deeply to address this issue - why are people satisfied doing nothing and simply using handouts to survive? If they worked, shouldn't they become more prosperous? Why don't they have goals and aspirations? If someone is depressed, let's get them help. If the education system has failed them, let's fix that. It's easy to conflate the symptoms with the root causes, however the symptoms should not be ignored because they are the most visible feedback to most regular people, and that affects their perception of the system.
Who says they don't? People living on state benefits may yet have things they are passionate about. Their time is spent doing something, and sometimes that is something good for society, even though it isn't immediately profit-generating.
Living in Finland I met a man who was perpetually on the dole, but he was an extremely active Wikipedia editor, for example. I have often thought if that basic income existed, I could finally do some of the huge OpenStreetMap expeditions I had in mind (adding house numbers for the entire surrounding region, for example.)
Yes, some unemployed people might turn to drink, drugs, or petty crime, but this can be solved by building community infrastructure. The ills of the Parisian banlieues, for example, are often ascribed not just to unemployment, but to the fact that all the cultural and leisure facilities that were promised back in the 1970s were never actually built.
This is what most people do anyway. So, what's the problem?
>"Living in Finland I met a man who was perpetually on the dole, but he was an extremely active Wikipedia editor, for example. I have often thought if that basic income existed, I could finally do some of the huge OpenStreetMap expeditions I had in mind (adding house numbers for the entire surrounding region, for example.)"
It is my opinion that those are examples of vanity projects which provide little benefit to others, which is why I said:
>>"Your comment actually illustrates one thing I find repulsive about basic income proposals..."
I never said that this was true for any and all people, or that:
>>>"[I] just don't like what you think people would do with their time, if given the chance because they're not chained to a job"
For them to be vanity, one's work would have to actually be deeply associated with one's identity so that one could look good in the eyes of others. In fact, 99.9% of people using that data will not know or care who originally contributed it, and editing these resources is about as thankless a task as can be.
Work-for-pay tends to be more beneficial to others than 'creative expression'-type activities such as writing, painting, or composing music. The vast majority of what people create is worthless to others, whereas much of what people do 'for work' is actually useful to others.
I’ve occasionally edited Wikipedia, to correct grammatical or factual errors, but I don’t see it as having contributed much to the world.
This not liking vanity thing is interesting but if you tie it to economics then anything that helps people that doesn't make money --things like free software and participating in charities-- could be considered 'vanity' too despite the good they can do.
I got similarly worked up over 'virtue signaling' and people only doing good things for personal prestige when I was an angsty teen but later realised it was better to believe that some people want to do good things sometimes because reasons.
The US govt is currently spending about 2 trillion / year more than they take from their citizens in taxes.
Out of curiosity, what makes you think "We can afford it as a country"?
$4T per year is only 15% of GDP, right? 15% is the capital gains tax, and technically GDP is the measure of a country’s capital gained, so just apply the 15% capital gains tax to the country’s capital.
“But that’s a lot!” Yup.
“Is GDP growing enough?!” Not the way we treat workers today; the last time it was above 5% was, coincidentally, right when the wage/efficiency gap started widening.
“How do we make the math work then?” Good question. What figures make your approach work, given historical rates of GDP and growth pre-Reagan, post-Reagan, and in a theoretical world where pre-Reagan rates return once we stop abusing our workers?
I was just making the point that we have a lot of healing to do before we can presume to measure under UBI the contributions and growth and courage and strength of mind and will from the workers we’ve abused for forty years.
You’re making an argument that, I think (?), we can’t afford to allow 100% of our working age citizens to subsist on UBI. So tell us what figures you think would plausibly work in your own terms, so that we can see your complete viewpoint and argument. Is that $100/person/month or $1000? Are you accounting for GDP growth over ten years or not? What percentage of workers can we afford to carry on UBI for ten years? And so on.
Do the numbers work out better if you factor in an imaginary 50T reclaimed through taxation/levy/law from those who’ve accumulated it and transfer the entire sum directly into the UBI payout fund? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26102709
It’s fine to try and use math to argue your point, but being sarcastically dismissive with simple algebra hasn’t given me enough to give your point consideration, as I’m still not even sure I understand it yet. I did my best and I hope the above is some use to others, but I’m not confident at all that I understood well enough to reply to you.
I’m a big fan of having a robust social welfare system, but we need to acknowledge realities that maybe we don’t prefer to acknowledge. Many people on welfare are idle don’t do anything meaningful with their time. The response to that isn’t necessarily to cut welfare. It could mean taking a bigger picture look at society to see how changes have affected peoples’ abilities to have meaningful lives and civic engagement without work.
Do you have a citation for this claim? My understanding is that enormous numbers of welfare recipients are elderly, frail, or have chronic medical issues.
I would like to learn more about the issue. Do you have any references handy?
People may still 'take advantage' of it, by choosing not to work (if we got rid of all the systems requiring proof they're trying to find a job and etc), but honestly if the promise of making more no matter what they do, or how few hours they work, doesn't motivate them, I'm really not concerned about that loss of labor in the labor pool.
But it's worse than that. Wealth doesn't appear out of thin air. Money might, but money only matters insofar as what you can spend it on. If only 300 million apples are produced then no amount of moving money around will allow everyone (330m) to get an apple. You're not poor when your dollar wealth or income is low, you're poor when you can't get the stuff you need or want.
If you want to have a UBI without sending prices of everyday goods soaring then you need cheap production of those goods in quantities that will satisfy your population. The only realistic way of doing this in the modern world is automation. The cost of production for a lot of (most?) goods comes down to how much it costs all of the human labor that's combined to produce it. Eg in the case of apples somebody has to select which apple trees to grow, acquire land, invest in it, maintain them, pick the apples, sort them, find a buyer, transport them etc. All of these require some human labor and therefore have some significant cost. The more of this you can automate the lower the costs of these apples.
Whether UBI works will ultimately come down to the efficiency of production (or alternatively, shifting the poverty to another country that does the cheap production for you, but this can't last). You need to be able to satisfy the needs of the population with the labor of the part of the population that are net tax contributors.
Most proposals for UBI I've seen are truly universal, meaning that rich and poor alike are entitled to it.
I'm just saying, even without a UBI, the existing system could be made to work. 50% is just a number thrown out there; it can be reduced, it can be non-linear. The point is that as long as there is no cliff, no point where if you make $1 extra by working you net -lose- money, we avoid the existing issue.
As to whether there is enough utility at any given total income to warrant the extra work...that's a 'problem' we have now, and always will have. Presented with the opportunity, do I want to turn my time into money? That's entirely dependent on how much I value each of those things.
There's actually a reason I chose 50%, beyond it just being a nice round number. See, if the federal minimum wage was upped to $15 at the same time as changing welfare like this, we'd be able to institute the fall off while making the benefit of working those hours feel like the same amount of buying power as working now. Only difference is, essentially, that everyone making less than 2x welfare/etc benefits, would see a larger increase even than that.
Similar are the many programs that have cutoff at, say, 150% poverty level. Individually not a big deal, but when you lose a multitude of different benefits going from 25k to 35k income, it can be a perverse incentive.
not really, when you consider who must be paying for the original 10000 fun bucks. the person in your example is still achieving an effectively negative tax rate.
> and is likely to not incentivize work as much you might like.
this much I agree with. the 50% falloff is probably much too steep.
Over the last year, Americans have gotten about that much in "stimulus", but many of us had to spend it all on rent and other bills.
Long term, not engaging in meaningful work has many downsides (substance abuse, relationship, career growth, etc) and its not just about money. But going to a grueling 9-5 to make less money for long term benefits is still a tough sell
Not working leads to... substance abuse? That sounds like some very puritanical " Idle hands are the devil's workshop" mentality.
What's more, what is so meaningful about being overworked, underappreciated, and paid less than a living wage? That soul crushing work is where you start to see people seeking escape and/or less-than-legal sources of income.
In fact, what you often seen is that, given enough breathing room to do so, people can achieve remarkably productive works. Linus Torvalds and J.K. Rowling are oft-cited examples of people who created magnum opuses while on benefits. Had their days been occupied working multiple minimum wage jobs, we might never have gotten Linux or Harry Potter.
It also comes from systems. They function to expand themselves, not to serve the purpose for which they were created.
Usually this is "solved" via "aligning incentives". [1] But as we all know from James Cameron's documentaries as he followed the Connors, it's not that easy to notice when things go awry.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble... [1] https://intelligence.org/research/
This is a person with high education, without any major disability or impediment to working, they just choose not to work because the state allows it.
But so what?
The goal of a program should be effectively improving the functioning of society. That can still be a real outcome even if there are people who choose to be less productive so they can obtain benefits.
So what? Neither is right, generally. The political discussion about social programs needs to be about how to maximize their effectiveness, not to be about this existential struggle between two sides who both deny reality.
The concept might be foreign to most HNers, but lots of people lack entrepreneurial spirit, they instead attempt to minimize pain in their lives.
As long as it's sustainable, why worry? Do we want to drag people into productivity or just let them live their own lives?
I think it's inefficient to do the former.
I think this is the perfect outcome for the type of person who wants to live their life that way because the alternative, working somewhere, means they will be the worst coworker or employee you have ever had. They'll do just enough to not be fired and never enough to actually be worth their paycheck, walking the line and wasting resources that could be spent elsewhere. I've worked with this person and they destroy team morale and productivity without even trying, they're not bad people and I harbor no ill-will towards them, they just don't want to be there and have very few other options in our society.
While I think we must take care not to create too much of incentive for this lifestyle, I will happily pay money out of my paycheck to not have to work with those that prefer it.
Sounds like another symptom of a larger problem. Maybe a lack of reasonable opportunities? Or wages are too low to justify working due to child care or commuting costs? Maybe it's the insane cost of healthcare?
These people aren't living a comfortable life on meager government benefits. They subsisting on it because the alternative of working for a poverty wage is worse.
If you want more people to work, push for higher wages. If you want people to be capable of working for less money, ensure that childcare, public transportation, and healthcare are subsidized enough to make those wages livable.
They had ample opportunity to work, were technically skilled in a desirable field, and had a job in that field for some time.
There wasn't a mitigating circumstance outside of not wanting to work very much. If you have your housing set up for you, the state pays your healthcare and gives you food assistance, and you like cooking simple meals for yourself... well you don't actually need money for all that much.
It wasn't a matter of earning a poverty wage or not, it was a matter of earning a middle class wage or not. They chose not because they figured out how to do so and live the life they wanted.
There were social media posts boasting about this.
I ask because my family member tries something similar, but it only really works because I pay for their housing. It just doesn't seem possible to live on $350/mo otherwise.
And I could point to social media posts admitting to this strategy to take advantage of these support programs, but I wouldn’t.
Indeed. I also suspect "wrong people" is a slightly quieter dog whistle/code word for you know, "those people".
I also wonder how the welfare cheater statictic compares to the disability cheater statistic. I'd even wager disability is far more abused than welfare by ablebodied workers who make good money and have homes.
Now imagine if we used the same "wrong person" argument against disability and watch the same people who would vote against welfare vote in favor of disability because they might be affected.
prioritization in vaccination at the cost of incredible inneficiency is celebrated by the media and our political class. I'm not so upset about the cost as much as the delays it causes to herd immunity. which is presumably what this vaccination program is all about.
There are two issues with this:
- "government handouts" and a reliance on welfare are typically a symptom, not a root cause, of an ailing society -- there are bigger issues at play around wealth and ownership if a large segment of the population needs government assistance
- "welfare queens" is largely a fiction -- the story comes from Linda Taylor[0], a woman who cheated the welfare system, but was caught, tried, and served prison time for her fraud. In other words, the system worked, but anyone relying on government assistance should be punished for it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Taylor