Related, and equally hard to cover online:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39978774 ("HN: Steven Levitt and John Donohue defend the abortion-crime hypothesis")

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2024/04/08/steven-le... | https://archive.today/m3zl0 ("Steven Levitt and John Donohue defend a finding made famous by “Freakonomics”")

It would also help if more people that are doing marginal work could receive a wage that they felt secure with. Money is one of the biggest stressors for couples and families.

I don't understand how to practically make this work.

There's a strong case to be made that a minimum wage helps people whose value approaches the minimum while hurting people above or below (e.g. $12 and $18 wages in an unlimited market both round to $15 with a minimum, while someone who only produces $7 of value is no longer employable). Similarly with cash infusions - giving people more money is inflationary.

Nobody wants to live in a world where people are trying to participate in society and failing. That's truly heartbreaking.

At the same time, naive solutions (decide a "living wage" and force people to pay it, set up and enforce rent control, give out stimulus payments) seem to have a lot of second-order effects/unintended consequences without actually solving the problems they're meant to solve.

My personal position is to abolish the minimum wage and update the tax scale with negative tax rates that support a reasonable quality of life at all income levels. The market will find its own balance for what a true minimum wage is in that environment (and not have weird perverse incentives like you state).

Yes, this is UBI. But phrased as a tax cut makes it politically viable (at least in the US).

I would be interested to see this modeled.

One of the classic unintended consequences of social welfare is making someone at the bottom unwilling to work. We saw this during the pandemic when people in formerly low-wage jobs got a lot of cash assistance and stopped being interested in low-wage jobs. (Remember all the "help wanted" signs and early closing hours at local restaurants?)

I'm curious to see an example scale that would continue to incentivize social behavior the whole way up the chain - avoiding the "oh I don't want to make $100 more dollars because I'm in a sweet spot now and bad things happen at $99."

You can certainly argue that many of the current disincentives are bugs in the bureaucracy. I'd like to see a proposal for the UBI tax scale you describe that doesn't have any bugs (that is, bumps in the distribution where people are afraid to reach for state C from state A, because the intermediary state B is worse than A).

Very much agreed that there should be no cliffs. Every dollar earned should at minimum increase your usable cash flow by at least X amount no matter where you are in the income distribution and other tax incentive phase space

We should not make it more than $1000 per month. Very few would choose to be poor. It would put a lot of pressure on companies to pay decent wages, though.

$1000/month is $12,000/year. Thats far far below poverty levels. It needs to be enough that people can choose to supplement in order to engage with luxury consumption. If people are forced to supplement to just survive, then we need to maintain the minimum wage and a whole host of other weird baggage.

The 2024 FPL figure is $15060 + 5380 per additional person family member past the first. $12k/head/year comes up a bit short for an individual, but it's not that far off—expenses involved in holding down a job probably actually account for the difference anyway.

It also becomes clearly tenable with households of more than 1. Supporting a family of 2-3 on $24k-36k is like, yep, I've met married international grad students. Of course they'll spring for supplemental income where available, but as a baseline it is tenuously "enough".

The goal can't be to solve every desperation case. But if the program wouldn't allow individuals living in dangerous and exploitative situations to confidently leave them (financially) Id argue the program was a failure

> One of the classic unintended consequences of social welfare is making someone at the bottom unwilling to work. We saw this during the pandemic when people in formerly low-wage jobs got a lot of cash assistance and stopped being interested in low-wage jobs. (Remember all the "help wanted" signs and early closing hours at local restaurants?)

I remember this, the cash assistance gave people back their time to focus on starting their own businesses, pursuing self-education, taking care of their kids, etc. It was fully apparent to me that these low-wage jobs effectively trapped people by sucking up all the time they had for self-improvement.

> We saw this during the pandemic when people in formerly low-wage jobs got a lot of cash assistance and stopped being interested in low-wage jobs. (Remember all the "help wanted" signs and early closing hours at local restaurants?)

Unwilling to work or temporarily not desperate to stay alive? How many receiving assistance were still working, just doing it less?

The only studies on outcomes I recall is that a lot of kids were no longer experiencing food insecurity.

I can’t imagine they were very compelling studies if the only changes they could come up with was “some kids were less hungry”

Someone doesn't understand the effects of food insecurity:

https://www.heart.org/en/news/2021/09/22/food-insecuritys-lo...

I don’t understand the effects of food security because I think there’s more than one problem?

That "classic unintended consequence" was specifically tested many times in UBI context, and study after study doesn't find it in any noticeable amount.

In any case, given how badly broken the current system is, surely it's at least worth a try?

It is important that this is based on all income levels equally. Yes, some will pay back that money in taxes, but the important part is keeping the amount equal. It would be even more effective if you gave them a monthly check (even if you would eventually take it all back via a consumption tax on people earning more). A ~25% national sales tax should be sufficient to cover a UBI program. (We should still have an income tax, though.) Furthermore, a consumption tax would decrease unnecessary spending since you can target only new products and not used products to encourage people to reduce, reuse, and recycle.

If UBI is encoded as a negative tax rate at low income levels, it no longer really makes sense to talk about it as applying to all income levels equally. It naturally gets distributed as

1) A check (issued by Social Security service?) if income is less than X

2) Less of your paycheck being withheld if your income is greater than X (or more if you're significantly above X, depending on how this gets funded)

We have a tax rate with negative tax rates at the low end of the scale. For sketchy social policy/political tenability reasons it doubles as a child subsidy and phases in up to a nominal amount of preexisting so-called earned income, but functionally that's what the earned income tax credit is.

Expansion of the EITC program is fairly well-regarded among economists and has been historically quite popular! We should do more of it!

True. It would be nice to decouple it from children and expand its scope of economic impact dramatically.

I have a family member that is severely disabled. She used to be on a program where the government would supplement her wages - she worked at Jack in the Box, where her employer would pay like $3/hr and the government would top that up to $10/hr.

Now that program is gone and minimum wage for fast food is $20/hr. She simply cannot perform $20/hr worth of work, so she's unemployed (and living on government assistance).

The previous arrangement was fantastic because the work gave her a purpose and something to do all day, and she contributed to society while saving the government money. Now she stays home and watches TV endlessly.

This has informed my ideas - I think supplementing minimum wages could be a better alternative to UBI (with some exceptions).

There's usually carveouts for people with certain disabilities. It allows companies to pay them below the minimum wage. I would be surprised if that was abolished with the increase in minimum wage.

It’s a federal law, and it still exists.

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/39-14c-subminim...

She could do some volunteer work.

> someone who only produces $7 of value is no longer employable

This is the wrong model. You're using a worker's wage to describe their productivity, and a big reason for the mess we're in is that wages stopped increasing with productivity fifty years ago. (search "wages productivity graph")

This feels like you're nitpicking the language, not the thinking.

Imagine someone's contribution to a business increases revenue by $1000 and the total cost to employ that person for the same period is $800. Do you think most businesses would go "nope, we only hire highly leveraged people who produce $2000 in revenue"?

There are inefficiencies in scale (like communication/bookkeeping overhead) that might disincentivize a business from growing, but generally speaking, I think it's fine to model decisions as rational cost/benefit ones.

Workers who are only "worth it" at some wage. Nobody is going to pay you a million dollars to go sell a hundred dollars worth of stuff. If the value you can earn on the market is sufficiently lower than what someone is allowed to pay, they simply won't hire you. That's bad for everyone.

Except an employee's contribution isn't static, while their cost is.

$7.25 x 8 hours = $58 for the day. However what they create is based on output, which for most businesses, varies day by day along with their sales.

A McDonald's could sell 500 burgers in one day at one location, but only 300 at another. In this case the employee at the larger restaurant generates 2/5 more value than the employee at the smaller one, even if both can output at the same speed and quality. So, in reality, the employee at the larger restaurant is being exploited by 2/5 more than the employee at the smaller location. Which also means the employee at the smaller location is getting paid more for doing 2/5 less work than an equally capable employee.

Profits are multiplicative yet unpredictable, while labor is static and predictable.

Comparing someone's wage to the value they produce is a fine way for a company to decide whether to hire someone, but I didn't think that was the question you were trying to answer, was it? Perhaps I misunderstood, but I thought you were asking something like, what policy would help people who are at the margins, which is an economy-wide question that can't be answered from one employer's perspective. Workers may only be "worth it" at some wage, at some point in time, but that wage is subject to supply and demand just like everything else. A policy intervention like raising the minimum wage will alter that supply/demand curve.

For example, suppose janitors all make the minimum wage. If we increase it, there might be some company at the margin that will go without janitorial services, but most companies will pay their janitors the new wage, which (from the "a worker costs $X and produces $Y" model's perspective) will look a lot like the nation's janitors suddenly started producing more value. Ergo, it's not to say that that model is wrong, just that it's not useful in answering a question like should we increase the minimum wage.

A rather low hanging fruit is smoothing out welfare cliffs so poor people don't feel stuck in an position of a local maximum of utility near the bottom. The problem is that these initiatives are very complicated, and you get more public support just blindly throwing money at the problem.

I don't think it works if we're narrowly focused just on wages, but I don't know why that has to be the only focus. If we as a society want to support people having a baseline quality of life, then let's pay for it together rather than pushing it all on employers.

I don't think we put enough money behind it today, but the Earned Income Tax Credit is designed to do this while minimizing the disincentives for people to work. https://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-the-earned-incom...

>If we as a society want to support people having a baseline quality of life, then let's pay for it together rather than pushing it all on employers.

Baseline quality of life isn't decided just by pay. I find that society doesn't support people having a baseline quality of life when it comes to areas other than pay, so it makes me question the motives of society in the case of pay.

The real issue is that a few people have accumulated a lot of wealth and property, and they use it as a tool to extract even more money. It's basically the late stage capitalism money vacuum hoovering up everything. In the past the only levers we had against this were breaking up firms and enforcing anti-monopoly and preventing capital from even entering certain parts of our economy. We could, for example, ban private equity companies from buying houses and healthcare companies, break up national monopolies into regional companies, and eliminate a lot of the consolidation that has traditionally enhanced the bargaining power of the company owner against the employees.

In the short term it would make a lot of stuff less efficient, but when people talk about "efficiency" they really mean driving costs down and driving income up. So we really don't want an efficient capitalist economy, we want a capitalist economy that is just efficient enough to meet our needs while not being so efficient that a few people can exploit that efficiency and run away with our things.

Abolish the minimum wage along with density restrictions in zoning. Make it affordable for someone making $300 per month to have shelter.

I do not disagree. But it will take years, if not decades, for labor rights and organizing to improve the situation you mention. Preventing unwanted children takes less time and effort, tragic as it is to type out.

You can change up the emotions on the topic pretty quickly if you change the framing to "intentional sex only" rather than "intentional children only," even though the former accomplishes the latter.

It's fun, because you can get virtually everyone to agree that people should only have sex they mean to have, but as soon as you suggest they should only have sex when all parties involved have carefully and accurately assessed the risk of pregnancy, you're a killjoy.

> Intentional children only.

Speedrunning human extinction?

Are you suggesting that humanity will die out so long as only willing, intentional parents have children? That is an interesting thesis and conclusion to come to (total fertility rate = 0 vs somewhere between 0 and 2.1 [replacement rate]).

We should empower people who want children to succeed, and empower people who don't want children to never have them. What happens after that, we can solve for.

I think many people have a misunderstanding of what lower fertility means. Imagine a country has a fertility rate of 1. It doesn't seem that bad because it's pretty close to replacement. But fertility is an exponential system. So a fertility rate of means that each following generation (~20 years) will be half as large as the one that came before it (the formula is simply a ratio of fertility_rate/2). So you won't see any problem at all until the first generation to have low fertility starts to die. At that point you suddenly start seeing a rapid exponential effect. Every ~20 years (the size of a generation) your population size will be decreasing by 50% !!! And this never stops until you go extinct (which won't take particularly long), or start having children again.

It's easy to imagine 'oh we'll just fix it if it becomes a serious problem like that' but imagine the state of society when that starts happening. All markets/consumption will be decreasing by 50% every 20 years, there will be a very upside down population pyramid where the overwhelming majority of the population will be elderly and need care, so forth and so on. Japan, for instance, hasn't even hit the worst of it yet. Their fertility plummeted about 40 years ago. So their 'final stage' is yet still about 20 years away. Today are the good times for Japan, relative to what they have ahead of them.

Given most of the Western world can't maintain a remotely stable fertility rate in the current situation, doing something that would likely quite substantially lower it even further is indeed speedrunning the extinction of Western civilization!

> imagine the state of society when that starts happening

The state of my own personal society is my apartment costs $1000 more than it did two years ago and my food costs about 25-30% more than it did two years ago. I definitely wouldn't consider having another kid, nor would I encourage my own to have one.

Absolutely understandable, yet it also leads to a somewhat odd and undesirable reality. The problems you're talking about are ones that we inflicted upon ourselves, owing largely due to poor systems (and societies) enabling the turds of society rise to the top.

So what will the systems and societies of tomorrow look like? Every child born tomorrow is basically just a lottery roll against all people having children today. And today you have vast numbers of intelligent, educated, conscientious, and far thinking individuals are simply removing themselves from the gene pool; that lottery roll for the children of tomorrow is looking less and less pleasant.

There's this irony that the sort of mindset that might consciously make the decision to not have children is the exact sort that should be raising a family 1800s style, if we want a better world. Maybe there's just something about successful urbanization that ultimately causes societies to reboot. The Roman Empire also faced a major fertility crisis in its final years.

Current global population is ~8 billion. Momentum will take us to ~10 billion by 2100. Will it be a challenge to manage this rapid population decline and attempting to provide real, meaningful community support [1] and social systems [2] to potential parents to encourage them to have children (in order to raise the total fertility rate to a steady state level)? Certainly, without any doubt or hesitation. We spent up a credit card balance of sorts with a ballooning global population, that debt will need to be paid back in various ways. But extinction? Hardly.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/29/baby-boomtown-...

[2] https://ifstudies.org/blog/pro-natal-policies-work-but-they-...

We understand the implications, but I would not want anyone to bring forth children that are unwanted, thus bringing more unhappiness into those parents' lives (and their surrounding community).

Our society needs to treat children as a gift and not just "thoughts and prayers" about raising them.

> speedrunning the extinction of Western civilization!

Western civilization was always a good idea, never achieved, and they have had their day

> I think many people have a misunderstanding of what lower fertility means. Imagine a country has a fertility rate of 1. It doesn't seem that bad because it's pretty close to replacement.

That's not even close to replacement. It's somewhere above 2 (often cited as 2.1, but it may be more like 2.04 in times of peace) for it to be replacement. If you could magically make fertility be that number, population increases would only come as a matter of life expectancy increase.

1 actually implies some sort of high-speed demographic implosion that will wreck an economy within a single human lifetime.

> It's easy to imagine 'oh we'll just fix it if it becomes a serious problem like that'

If it takes 30 years to recognize the problem, then one generation has already aged out of ever possibly being able to fix the problem, and the next generation is getting too old to be able to fix it (unless you can do so instantly). You've only got a few generations at a given time that can fix it.

> Japan, for instance, hasn't even hit the worst of it yet. Their fertility plummeted about 40 years ago.

There are fewer people living in Japan today, than there were a year ago. They didn't leave to go elsewhere. They died. And it will be like that every year until there are zero Japanese left. They have been functionally extinct for a few years now, though they may not know it yet.

> it even further is indeed speedrunning the extinction of Western civilization!

There haven't been distinct, compartmentalized civilizations on Earth for over a century at this point. There's only the one civilization. And, if it dies, there likely won't be another. Who had "can't be bothered to fuck" on their Fermi's Paradox bingo card?

Saying society is going to collapse due to population decline is about as absurd as saying society will collapse due to overpopulation.

What will end up happening is that some groups will maintain replacement fertility levels or higher, and some groups won't, but we'll trend towards an equilibrium, or flop between too little fertility and too much fertility. Either way we won't go extinct unless we explicitly kill each other.

It depends on what you mean by society. If you mean the entire world, then of course I agree with you. But cultures and societies do go extinct, quite regularly. The Roman Empire, most notably, also had a fertility collapse in their final years. And by the end Rome itself had just become a facsimile of what was once the greatest city of the greatest empire in the world.

So, for instance, many people don't realize that right now is still the good times for Japan. Here [1] is their population pyramid. It currently still looks kinda-sorta pyramidish. But in ~20 years, their population pyramid will be completely and wholly upside down. And their population, economy, and everything else will fall into complete collapse. They'll be losing about half of their population each 20 years at that point. No culture can survive this. This will be made even more true by the fact that it will likely trigger a vicious cycle where the massively skewed age ratios, collapsing economy, and other issues will further reduce fertility.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#/media/F...

Even if it was the case, would it be a problem? What is more important, having less humans being happy or more humans having a crappy life. Why should specie survival be more important than overall happiness of those that would have lived?

This is a tangent, but when in the world did "happiness" become a desirable metric? If you think about it, it's really quite absurd. Happiness is a brief liminal state that should be triggered by relatively infrequent events. It is not a normal, nor desirable, default state.

Contentedness, satisfaction, at-peace, and so on - there endlessly more rational, logical, desirable, and attainable things to aim for. Yet everybody always says happy. Maybe this even goes some way towards explaining the plummeting mental state of the West at large. If one sets their life goal towards happiness, then they're ironically certain to end up unhappy, unsatisfied, and discontented.

Agreed that affirmative happiness is very hard to think about as a target.

But I find that most people, when they say that, actually mean reduction of suffering. That's easier to quantify--but still quite difficult, like most quantities in social research.

Do you not then run into other problems? For instance I find that lifting brings an immense amount of contentedness, yet it's essentially hours upon hours of self inflicted suffering and pain. The same is true of family. Somebody raising a 2 year old could describe it in many ways, but reduction of suffering would not be one. Such things greatly contribute to this sense of contentedness and satisfaction.

> Contentedness, satisfaction, at-peace, and so on

Could you explain to me how this is not another name for happiness?

They are extremely different states of being.

You are happy to receive good news, or for something to turn out well, or whatever else. But it is not a resting state. It's a liminal state. Contentedness, by contrast, is a resting state. You can awake contented, fall asleep contented, and spend your days contented. You may rarely, if ever, experience happiness - yet find yourself able to find satisfaction in life nonetheless.

By contrast a pitiful, depressed, self loathing individual, can experience happiness as much as anybody else. But he is most certainly not content nor satisfied. Perhaps a junky would be another example. A junky certainly experiences happiness when his poison enters his veins, yet he almost certainly is far from content or satisfied.

You are just being pedant while answering to a non native english speaker.

No, the words just have extremely different meanings. A child opens a Christmas present and starts rejoicing - nobody would claim 'Ah, look at him - he's so content!' One could even take this a step further to add that children, in general, cannot be content.

Contentedness is not happiness. And happiness is most certainly not contentedness. They're are just entirely different states of being.

First, it's important to understand that words mean what people tend to use them to mean.

Second, "happy" and "happiness" subsume numerous meanings. You're picking one, and as I and others have, at times, done with many other words, trying to restrict the world to only that meaning.

Perhaps a more similar word to your meaning would be "joy"? It seems more generally restricted to descriptions of brief periods, in common usage.

If I were simply restricting the meaning, then the examples I am offering would mean you could use happy or e.g. contentedness interchangeably, or at least doing so wouldn't sound ridiculous. Yet I'm sure you're realizing by now that you cannot! For another example - a stern and disciplined person, who is rather dour of character, could be completely contented, but it would be illogical to call this person "happy", however you might want to define the term.

The words are simply not synonyms, or even particularly close to being synonyms.

> when in the world did "happiness" become a desirable metric?

Happiness is not a metric, cannot be measured, and is one of the most important things

Despite it being unmeasurable we know that economic security increases it

"Happiness", not "perpetual state of unbridled ecstasy"

Presenting dire conclusions without providing a shred of substance?