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

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

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

That might be true for maybe 5-10% of 20-somethings. The rest will blow it.

It feels like everyone that has an anti-UBI position has access to a lot of research that no one else can see - or they're just unwilling to read or accept the results of every study / bit of research actually done on the topic.

Either it is never universal, and / or participants know that it isn't going to last long (limited duration study) so they have different motivations than someone who will actually receive UBI.

Every study basically has the same (obvious and not useful) conclusion: people like getting money. Any conclusion beyond that (specific to UBI) isn't supported.

One is Alaska’s Permanent Fund. Look at their gini index among all 50 states since the fund launched.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pop4.398

And the conclusions are similar. Better health. Lower inequality

The other is Manitoba’s MINCOME experiment, they randomly selected people — it was doing very well but somehow the powers that be pulled the plug: https://humanrights.ca/story/manitobas-mincome-experiment

If $150 a month can make people’s lives better, in a state that doen’t issue its own currency, imagine what phasing in a UBI for everyone in USA can do, gradually and increasing. And that’s the point.

USA will have to print money anyway to service their sovereign debt. So may as well give it out as a UBI over 40 years first, then tax it and pay the treasury holders. Think about it!

This has been so apparent to me over the last 20 years. I've seen so many people who wanted to switch jobs - perhaps a move to other parts of the country for a new job - but are very tied to employer-provided insurance. People with family members with varying health issues often feel especially 'stuck' to particular jobs because of the 'good' insurance, perhaps tied to specific regional hospitals with specific networks of doctors and specialists. I've heard this from multiple colleagues over the years and it's so disheartening. We've got so much unlocked human potential, and we get tied to specific areas because of arbitrary self-imposed constraints. Self-imposed I mean on ourselves as a whole, not individually-imposed.

So so so disheartening...

In your 20s it might also unlock travel and adventure.

"Tiny Minority" until you no longer need a job to maintain the lifestyle. A non zero amount of people will go from not traveling, to traveling.

This is neither a criticism nor endorsement of UBI. Its just an observation.

Isn't this making the argument in favor of a UBI? The theory behind SNAP is they have to buy food instead of stupid things, but then they just buy stupid food.

Meanwhile someone who is actually having a hard time gets put in a bind because they'd otherwise be willing to eat day old bagels and whatever's on the menu at the soup kitchen in order to save up for what they really need, which is the deposit for an apartment. But you can't use SNAP for that and then the government is paying the same money for worse results.

Not UBI but this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_GLfxaYTYI) shows (claims) rent always rises to suck up available money. Why? Not because landlords are evil, no, because once people have more money many of them want a nicer place. There are a limited number of nicer places so the prices rise since all these new people with a little more money bid up what they're willing to pay.

The same will be true of UBI and anything you think it enables. There are limited number of planes, boats, hotels, hostels so the moment everyone can do it is the moment there's more demand than supply and prices will go up.

The larger point is that it's not about if you get UBI. It's about if everyone gets UBI

I’d like to emphasize “grinding” here. For many it’s a grind in the truest sense, involving decades of backbreaking physical work. For others it’s immense stress to keep a roof over their family’s head no matter what. By the time retirement rolls around practically everybody has been burned out to some degree but had to power through regardless simply because quitting wasn’t an option.

Yeah, under conditions like that, people are indeed going to stop working the very second they’re no longer required to in order to survive. Things like UBI, 4-day work weeks, remote work, and fair compensation would all improve that situation measurably.

I stopped when I was 55 (didn't have a choice, actually). Fortunately, I had saved wisely, and lived frugally, so I was able to stop working (which was good, because no one wanted me, anyway).

I actually get more done, every day (like, seven days a week), than I did when getting paid.

ToMAYto, ToMAHto...

I think it is really common for retiree risk takers to swing for the fences in their 60's.

Their time is freed up and often lump sums become available: retirees often feel they need to make money to live well in retirement. I'm sure you can think of cliched coffee shop entrepreneurs, restaurant owners, franchise purchasers and investment property purchasers.

The reason it's such a well known cliche is because of how often they get burnt (due to poor understanding of risks) and many lose their homes.

I really notice it because I'm nearer retirement than 20 (they're not my peers but my acquaintances span a wide range of age and money demographics).

No, it's the difference between getting a pension (a guaranteed income for the rest of your life) and a second job's salary without working it. Basically the "basic income" experiments create Reddit r/overemployed participants without even having to work the additional job.

I suspect when I'm 45, $10,000 won't get nvidias flagship card, so I'll let you know about that one when I get there

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

Who knows how many people should retire at 30 if the social norms allowed it.

Think about it this way. If a 60 year old says “I’m retiring” most responses will be “aw good for you, you earned it”. But if a 23 year old says “I am retiring” I guarantee there will be many more negative responses and questions.

Gee why would they stop working, you think?

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

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

> beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!

Unfortunately the governments and the wealthy looked at Hayek and decided they much preferred the idea where they could continue to abuse the workers.

Do we have any guarantees of this? Couldn't we equally have way less Nurses, Doctors, ER Techs, Construction Workers building homes, Teachers.

Feels like all the stressful, back-breaking jobs will be quitting first?

No, because we actually need those things, so we would keep hiring people to do them, whereas useless makework jobs are the obvious thing to cut if there is less labor available.

Work expands to fill all available time. Make less time available and there will be more pressure to stop doing useless work.

Meanwhile the reason that people become nurses instead of social media managers is that nurses are paid more than social media managers and simultaneously attract people who want to feel like they're doing something meaningful instead of something useless, both of which would continue to be the case.

It's also obvious to me, that anytime any worker feels financially comfortable to stay home, a huge chunk of them will inevitably be hijacked by algorithmic feeds. Everything else is just some version of "pick yourself up by the bootstraps".

I am expecting Social Media Managers to be paid hand over foot to handle this transition even though they might find other work more meaningful (much like Real Estate Agents now, who would rather be doing something else, but the money is too good).

These are not reasons not to do UBI, but if there is economic devastation after, you can expect a quick reversal and a generation-wide flopping of the idea. So might as well fix these underlying issues as you do UBI.

Have you met any people who were eligible for a pension at e.g. 50? I know a few, they all retired. Not because they couldn't continue to work, but because with the pension they were finally able to quit.

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

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

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

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

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

Quite the opposite. I basically retired at 40. A few of my coworkers did the same. Most people, when given the means to quit working, choose to retire.

Most people don't retire at age X because they have reached age X, they do it because they finally are eligible for a pension.

But yeah, I guess many people dont want to work because their options for work suck. It is not that many of those their contribution is not basically 0 or negative now as it is and with robots/ai coming in the coming 50 years, I rather have them living a human life with social housing, free playstations and basic income instead of slaving away at something useless just because of some weird idea that any work is better than no work to spend their short life on.

You do get that's anecdotal, right?

And that a basic income will mean you don't die from starvation, but won't give you the kind of comfortable lifestyle that you and a few of your ex-coworkers presumably scored from some happenstance in your employment arc, right?

And that there's lots of research about how 'most people' do not in fact stop working, at least within the confines of the trials done, right?

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess your monthly spending exceeds $10-20k and is probably well north of $100k.

oh well that's cuz they're retired.

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

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

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

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

In fact, pension funds invest in businesses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Productivity". Give us a break.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What causes you to believe that a transfer payment would be inflationary? Some high-paid partner at a law firm has less money, some low-paid teacher has more money, net amount of money everybody has in total hasn't changed.

This is the positive intention of UBI, but I cannot understand how people think “some people are so low paid that they don’t save or invest while others are able to accumulate large nest eggs” doesn’t imply that it we shift money from the latter to the former that we won’t see an increase in the consumption that will exceed the increase in production.

Here's a fun example: Suppose the investor was buying condos and speculating on real estate prices without renting them out. If you transfer money from the investor to the spender, the spender uses it to buy a condo for consumption because they want to live in it. The amount of production hasn't changed at all and the amount of consumption has increased by converting waste (a vacancy) into use/consumption.

Or suppose if you give someone more money they'll use it to buy a new phone. Then more phones have to be produced -- but the vast majority of the production cost of a phone is from amortizing the fixed costs of the R&D and buying the manufacturing equipment etc. The incremental cost of making another phone when those are all sunk costs is tiny. Meanwhile the gross profit from those additional purchases goes to the seller which they can use in lieu of investment to cover the incremental increase in the cost of production. It can even make the average price of the phone go down by allowing the fixed costs to be amortized over more units.

If you want data then you're arguing what we should do a large-scale UBI so we can see what happens.

You start off with a completely unproven belief, posited as a fact. I lost interest in your arguments after that. But I slogged on anyway, to no fruitful avail.

Is that true?

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

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

I think people and markets would just adapt to a lower level of consumption and amount of work. The work that people find truly important, like growing food, construction of housing, healthcare, etc. would remain in demand. The demand for things that people don't really want to work to create, or work to consume, would be reduced. So salaries for work that actually matters to people would increase and people would still do that work, and salaries for work that produces things that people don't really need would be reduced. In the end we'd have a society that only does the work that people actually want and need to get done and consume only things that have enough value to justify working for it. Less work, less consumption, probably happier people.