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Ontario Launches Universal Basic Income Pilot (www.cbc.ca)
Reader epiphani writes: The Ontario Government will pilot universal basic income in a $50M program supporting 4,000 households over a 3 year period. While Slashdot has vigorously debated universal basic income in the past, and even Elon Musk has predicted it's necessity, experts continue to debate and gather data on the approach in the face of increasing automation. Ontario's plan will study three communities over three years, with participants receiving up to $17,000 annually if single, and $24,000 for families.
Automation has been going on since the industrial revolution, yet new jobs seem to keep on being created. My current job didn't really exist twenty years ago.
People keep predicting the obsolescence of humans but unemployment these days in most rich world economies is not that high. That said, it would be good if we had better ways of measuring employment beyond the binary employed/unemployed states. If someone's not claiming unemployment benefit and working then it's assumed that they're doing okay, but they might be working three minimum wage jobs and barely getting by. That should be as worrying to policy-makers as someone not working at all. Then we might be in a better position to see if we're at the point where we need a universal basic income.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I am pretty sure that penalizing people for becoming a "family" will have consequences.
With that said, if they do this pilot correctly it will yield very interesting data.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
start by lowering full time hours / making OT cost alot.
Why should jay have to work 60-80+ hours a week doing the work of 3 people for the pay of 1?
When we can fill that job with 3 people working about 30 hours each?
"with participants receiving up to $17,000 annually if single, and $24,000 for families."
Q: So why are you filing for divorce?
A: Irreconcilable financial differences.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Therefore the data collected and the conclusions drawn from this scheme (and all the other UBI pilots that have come and gone) is incomplete. We need to gauge the effect it will have on populations not for a few years, but how will it affect generations? Will a child growing up in a UBI household have a different attitude towards the need to get a job or attend school? Is there even any point in getting an education if you know that the state will provide everything - and that there probably won't be any jobs for you anyway?
A three year experiment won't tell you about the long-term consequences.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
You have to read down just a bit, and then you see:
"Jaczek said that people in the program will be randomly contacted from each region's low-income population and invited to apply."
Basic income, in any iteration I've seen seriously applied, isn't just for poor people. Money for poor people is fucking welfare. We have that already. Welfare is the "provision of a minimal level of well-being and social support for citizens WITHOUT CURRENT MEANS to support basic needs" (capsemphasis mine).
The idea of basic income is that everyone gets it baseline, no drama, no forms, no qualifications, with the obvious caveat that this money has to come from somewhere, so one assumes a relatively large increase in income tax. The supposed benefits and risks of this are numerous, but what is definitely known is that to actually test this, you need to not JUST be giving the money to poor people. The big question about basic income is, what effects will it have on society. You can make economic models all day long, the whole point about doing a test is to figure this out.
You want to know: are people less motivated to work? Are they healthier? Are they happier? What does it do to families? (the model being tested, where two single people living together get 2*17,000 = 34,000 a year, while if they marry they get 24,000 a year, has a pretty obvious and glaring bias as regards marriage)... and these questions aren't just relevant for poor people. They are relevant for middle class, and rich people.
All of these tests seem to be set up to give a certain set of results. They are carefully crafted to avoid asking the questions that need to be asked. I really don't know what to think about this.
It's really hard to tell if UBI is a great idea, or a horrible one, but the biggest issue is that it's impossible to trial in this manner.
To actually test UBI, several things need to happen:
1) you make it truly universal, no means testing, no targeting to certain demographics, everyone gets it, from the millionaires, to the homeless.
2) you cover everyone in a reasonably large geographic area, no exceptions.
3) You also need to turn off all the other services it's supposed to replace (welfare, employment insurance, disability amounts, etc)
This is important because without 1 and 2 you end up with a distorted system. You don't get to see if everyone having extra money simply drives all prices up by that amount making it useless (if the poverty line moves up by the exact amount of the UBI, have you really helped anyone?), or if it actually allows people to live. You end up with simply a lottery where some lucky people have more money, while everyone else has the same.
While 3 also helps make sure you're looking at an undistorted system, it is also about being able to afford to do this at all. UBI can only be affordable if you use it to cut out massive amounts of government bureaucracy, if all the bureaucracy is left in place, you'll never find enough money to make it work.
These trials will be a success or a failure depending on what the agenda of the study really is, but neither outcome tells you anything at all about how the system would actually work if rolled out universally.
If different people get different amounts based on disabilities or marital status then it's not universal.
If you get less depending on how much you make then it's not basic.
This is welfare. Try again, Canada.
Real programmers use "copy con program.exe"
"How about we just go back to capitalism and let shit fix itself?"
That's the problem -- this time, it can't. The average level of intelligence doesn't support full employment of people for the jobs that are left over after automation fully takes hold. For those that make it over this hurdle, the business owners controlling access to the few remaining jobs are going to realize their position and work to keep employment as low as possible, increasing their profits.
Businesses are greedy - they don't want to employ anyone. Fast food restaurants would happily replace all of their employees with robots and kiosks if they could, and this is the low end (minimum wage level) of employment. It gets even worse for knowledge workers -- this is why businesses offshore or push for visa programs that allow for cheaper labor.
I would add - the comments section of typical left-leaning news sites have become absolutely fanatical if even one dissenting opinion is expressed. If you agree with 90% of a topic/idea and provide criticism of the other 10%, you are dismissed as a racist nazi and shunned from the group. Try it some time as an experiment, they swarm like flies to honey. With that type of environment you simply will never see disagreement, people have better things to do than shout at a wall. Since Slashdot has people with higher average IQ, and a marginally better moderation system, dissenting thought isn't punished and can be debated on it's merits (to a point).
There's also the simple fact that a percentage of people will naturally shift right as they get older. So, if slashdot's reader base has good retention without much "new blood" being injected into it, this change could manifest as a result.
Apparently, being "at or just above the poverty line" is simply not enough for most people.
Or perhaps the words "three year experiment" are sufficient to suggest to people who would otherwise give up their jobs to live on the UBI that they ought to keep a job now to avoid having to find one again when the experiment is over and the free money stops coming in? Imagine if they are in a plight with a low paying job now, how much more trouble they will have finding a job in three years when other, younger people have snapped them up and businesses have downsized because the economy has shrunk.