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.

Comments

Unemployment

[fiannaFailMan]

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.

Re:Unemployment

[seven of five]

You're counted as "employed" whether you have a plum six-figure job or one that pays minimum wage. There's way too much underemployment -- adults laboring in entry-level jobs that pay poorly, or stuck in jobs they are overqualified for. On top of that, many rural communities are in decay, having once been dependent on a single employer or industry, which has since offshored or otherwise moved on. Trump smelled despair and got himself elected.

Sure, progress creates new jobs, but not in the numbers needed. Over time, the skill level of jobs taken over by machines increases, reducing income prospects for a greater number of people. At the same time, most businesses externalize the cost of training - they won't do it themselves; they expect people to "hit the ground running" after being hired.

If the employment picture were as rosy as you suggest, Uber/Lyft would have difficulty recruiting drivers. Instead, there's a glut.

Re:Unemployment

[butchersong]

I'm a pretty standard red state republican but I'm having a hard time arguing against some kind of fundamental change like basic income. You have to consider that a good percentage of the population has an IQ just barely above being considered mentally disabled. A larger percentage is just slightly above that. When burger flipping and warehouse jobs go away, those people won't be effective maintenance for the robots and anyway those maint positions would be some super low ratio to the number of jobs lost... Those people will not be artists.

I don't know that universal basic income is the way to go but we'll need to do something. Maybe some kind of beautification work force that essentially cleans and maintains things. Creates bike paths and plants landscaping. That would allow people to still work and get some fulfillment out of life.

Unintended consequences

[MightyYar]

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.

Re:Unintended consequences

[Areyoukiddingme]

With that said, if they do this pilot correctly it will yield very interesting data.

Pilots like this are useless. They have no predictive power because an actual universal basic income is qualitatively different from an "income you and a few of your neighbors will get for less than a handful of years and then it goes away." We already know what people do in circumstances like that. It's called graduate school.

For the timid politicians among us, I have bad news. UBI is untestable. You can't pretend to have it for a while and then discontinue it. But it doesn't matter. No country is ever going to just decide to have an actual UBI. When it happens, it will have happened organically, by easy stages over the course of decades. Social Security and the equivalents around the world are the beginning of that. The amazing ease with which a person qualifies for disability nowadays is another part of that. That's probably how the US will deal with all the unemployed truckers in 20 years' time. You were a trucker? Ok, now that robots do that job, you're "disabled." Because of the kidney damage you suffered due to all the vibration. Wink wink, nudge nudge, sign here.

What will happen is gradual, targeted expansions of social security/welfare that slowly absorbs sections of the population that are unemployable (just as they already do), and then gradually the means testing of those groups will go away, and in 60 years, if there is still such a thing as the developed world, it will have UBI. The rabid libertarians among us see this coming and are having screaming meamies about it because they think people who used to work in factories who then went to work in construction who then went to work driving trucks who now have nowhere to go should definitely die in the street because they can't become software developers. Not a straw man. I've had a person literally say that to my face within the past year, using the actual phrase "die in the street." A person who self-identifies as Christian, by the way, and who attends church every single Sunday. Yes, these are real people who do exist and do think that way.

I believe Marxism is inevitable, but Karl Marx was way ahead of his time, just as this silly "pilot" is. Capitalism is a reasonable system for dealing with scarcity. It does not deal at all well with super-abundance. Marxism deals well with super-abundance, but except for the idle rich, we do not have super-abundance. I believe it's possible that we will sometime before the end of the century, but I strongly expect it will be much nearer the end of the century than the beginning. And "pilots" like this are a waste of time.

start by lowering full time hours / makeing OT cos

[Joe_Dragon]

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?

Easy math

[Daetrin]

"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.

Re:where does all this money come from?

[fiannaFailMan]

i'd be mad as hell if i lived in one of these places and was subsidizing experiements to give people money without them contributing in any way

The liberal in me wants to react very strongly to this, but I did spend four years as a student in an English city called Salford. That place was infested with vast numbers of people who lived out their lives on the dole, many of them with no family tradition of work going back a few generations. They were generally troublemakers who got their kicks from attacking students (physically and verbally) on a regular basis. Crime levels were very high. One good thing is that there wasn't much gun crime since guns are so rare and hard to get in England, but instances of burglary, auto theft, shoplifting and anti-social behavior was just off the charts.

It will be interesting to see the outcome of these experiments, but I'm not optimistic about them.

Not Really Universal

[CastrTroy]

The province will explore the effectiveness of providing a basic income â" no matter what â" to people who are currently living on low incomes, "whether they are working or not," Wynne said. ...
A single person could receive up to about $17,000 a year, minus half of any income he or she earns.

None of these studies really seem to study true universal basic income, in which everybody, rich or poor, regardless of how much money they make, receives the same basic amount.

All the current trials going on seem to be focused on giving money to people who have no jobs or make very little. We already have program in place that do this kind of thing already, so they probably won't find a whole lot of difference with the systems that we already have. They are basically making small changes to the welfare system in order to not cut off benefits as soon as you find a job. But other than that, there isn't much difference.

Pilots don't work

[petes_PoV]

If people know that this scheme will have an end, they will take that into account and not change their behaviour as they would if it was permanent.

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.

Re:Pilots don't work

[ErichTheRed]

"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?"

I think that the point of these programs isn't to entirely replace the income that you would get by working an average job. I think it's more along the lines of softening the crushing experience of having to live on US-level unemployment benefits if you lose your job. Going down from your current salary to $410/week for what could be an extended period of time is something most people can't just cover out of savings, etc. Once you lose your income and access to credit, then start losing your possessions, life starts getting much harder.

What will be even more interesting is seeing what the plan is for dealing with the people who are just useless and can't be retrained for another "hip, modern" industry. You're not going to take a factory worker who's spent 20 years assembling the same set of parts and teach them to be a software developer, even a code monkey position isn't attainable without at least some aptitude. I'd say the humane thing to do would be to put them on the equivalent of Social Security Disability income for the rest of their lives. Many 50 year olds who are experiencing age discrimination are having to fake disability claims to bridge the gap between the "unhireable" phase of their work life and retirement, so this would provide them the same benefits and reduce fraudulent claims for the actual disability program.

Bad data from poor implementation

[Roger W Moore]

With that said, if they do this pilot correctly it will yield very interesting data.

I very much doubt it will because it is implemented in a way which directly undermines the arguments for universal basic income which is normally taken to mean that everyone gets a fixed income regardless of circumstances. Instead this project reduces that income at the rate of $1 for every $2 earned. Unlike the real deal this provides a reasonably strong motivation NOT to take low paying jobs since you only get a benefit of half the wage you earn. It also means that you now have to start means testing people to see how much they earn which requires bureaucracy and officials and incurs expense.

The whole point of basic income is to cut the administration expense because everyone gets it regardless while also preventing the disincentive to work of typical unemployment schemes by clawing back money when people get even a low paying job. The Ontario scheme fails to achieve either aim and so seems unlikely to work or provide any data about whether such type of schemes could work.

Re:Vigorous debate? Surely you jest

[Scottingham]

Seconded.

I've been on this site since about 2001. The 'This site has gone to shit' arguments have been around that long too. However, in the past 2 years (since around the /. Beta fiasco it seems) most of the quality comments have all but left. 'Conservative echo chamber' kinda hits the nail on the head. The libertarian dog whistle / talking points get trotted out so often it's just boring now to read. Arm-chair economists with such deep insights as 'Don't like your job, move and get another one, dummy!' seem to be about the best the site has to offer now.

Why am I still here then? Habit mostly, I gave it up (and read Soylent) for a good while, and now I come back, thought not as often as before. As for reading comments, I guess I still do out of some hope that they might get better again...though my tolerance is lower I spend only a fraction of the time trying to sift through the Randian garbage.

Re: Ontario, largest subnational debtor on the pla

[ghoul]

Wealth is an abstract concept. In nature noone owns anything. Its society which gives rise to law which gives rise to property and money which gives rise to wealth. if its not working for most people society has the right to decide to try another way. Given that more and more economic value is being created by machines whose income accrues only to the owners of the machines and not to entire society (though without society we would still be hunting and wearing skins so no machines would have been invented); we may need a new system. A star trek kind of society where people's basic needs are taken care of by the output created by machines (which are owned by society as a whole) and people work for prestige and luxuries. This can work in a society where 90% of the economic output can be provided by machines and you only need humans for 10% of the creative jobs. For such jobs a human who doesnt have to work but wants to do the work will be much more productive. The humans who dont want to work will be bored and eventually stop reproducing so the problem will solve itself over 5-10 generations in a humane manner.

Re:Vigorous debate? Surely you jest

[operagost]

Your problems are twofold.

1. You think libertarian is a synonym for conservative,
2. You believe that now that leftist voices don't drown out all others, that Slashdot is now a "conservative echo chamber." This is the response of people who are not used to having their ideas challenged.

Slashdot has always leaned left. Now it's centrist. And that bothers you. Ars Technica is leaning further left these days, so go hang there. They have a user moderation system that's dumber than Slashdot's, but at least you won't get the banhammer for irking any of the hired moderators on the articles anymore.

Re: Ontario, largest subnational debtor on the pla

[green1]

Except Ontario doesn't have control of the monetary supply so CAN'T print it.

As such, it DOES have to come from somewhere.

Re: Ontario, largest subnational debtor on the pla

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm... you think "bored" humans will stop reproducing? I don't think you know very many humans.

Poor study, this is welfare

[cfalcon]

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.

Re: Ontario, largest subnational debtor on the pla

[fluffernutter]

On the contrary, reproduction becomes a huge problem when sex is the only form of entertainment that people can afford.

No way to evaluate the pilot

[green1]

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.

Not in Canada...

[denzacar]

They already did a basic income experiment back when Prime Minister Trudeau was called Pierre.

In short... Most everyone kept working or didn't start working as early but stayed in school longer.
Also, hospitalizations went down, particularly for mental health problems.

But if you want a real Twilight Zone mindfuck - look up Nixon's basic income experiment.
Run by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
Granted... they saw it as a way to eliminate social programs instead of to expand them. But even they found that there was no change to "work ethic" - everyone still kept working.
Apparently, being "at or just above the poverty line" is simply not enough for most people.

Re:Not in Canada...

[Obfuscant]

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.

This is neither Universal nor Basic.

[Darth Muffin]

"A single person could receive up to about $17,000 a year, minus half of any income he or she earns. A couple could receive up to $24,000 per year. People with disabilities could receive up to $6,000 more per year."

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.

Re:Ontario, largest subnational debtor on the plan

[fluffernutter]

Exactly. You have to either make it simple for people to come off of welfare or stop complaining about people on welfare. You can't both punish them for leaving it and being on it. Pick one.

Re:Good - I hope it catches on

[ErichTheRed]

"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.

Re: Ontario, largest subnational debtor on the pla

[ShanghaiBill]

Umm... you think "bored" humans will stop reproducing?

Yes. The premise of TFA is that in the future we will have robots that can do anything that humans can do. I don't know how much an anatomically functional interactive sexbot will cost, but it will likely be way cheaper than alimony and child support, and it won't get headaches. If it has a "mute" button and can make sandwiches, that is even better.

Re:Vigorous debate? Surely you jest

[PrimaryConsult]

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.

Re:minwage $11.40-$9.90

[dinfinity]

I don't see minimum wage increasing jobs though. On the contrary, I think even economists that support an increase in minimum wage predict a small if negligible negative pressure on job numbers.

'Economists' are wrong very, very often (which is not in a small part because it's very hard to do conclusive research on economies). Their opinions aren't homogeneous either, so you can choose pretty much any point of view and support it by saying 'economists think so'..

The thing with income is that the first parts of it are spent very, very fast on essential goods and services. Supply side economics has clearly failed. It is time for demand side economics and UBI is the perfect tool for it.

Before anybody tries UBI I'd like to solve traps

[istartedi]

Before anybody tries UBI, I'd like to see trapless welfare. I don't know how bad this is in Canada, but the USA has a lot of "welfare traps". That's a situation where people remain on public assistance rather than work because their real income falls when they start working. We do so many stupid things such as labeling people "low income" and making them wait a long time for "low income housing". Then their "low income status" actually becomes an asset!

Fix that first, then get back to us.

Crime

[BankRobberMBA]

Convicted felon, here.
I disagree with almost everything you said.
I didn't rob a bank until I was 40 years old. Was I a moral person for the first 39 years, and then an immoral one after? Pretty simplistic. I postulate that you will abide by your morality right up until your kid says "Daddy, I'm hungry" and you have nothing to feed her. (I'm not saying this is what happened to me, but to a lot of bank robbers I met inside.) Maybe you're different. Kudos to you, if so, I guess.
The biggest cause of poverty is not government regulation, that's ridiculous. I suspect it's poor understanding of money by parents and peers, causing poor behavior modeling. There's a reason college graduates' kids go to college and the working class poors' kids go to the payday loan shop when things go south. Did your parents launch you on a positive trajectory? How did they know how to? Maybe they didn't. Again, maybe you're different. Kudos to you.
Mine wanted to, but didn't know how.
Sure, socialism is always doomed to failure, if you reduce everything down to a false dichotomy. Look how much better the outcomes were in the 1800s for the robber barons. Not so much for normal people.
Anyway, they're TRYING it. Let's at least wait and see.

Re:minwage $11.40-$9.90

[silentcoder]

In what insane world is businesses "pushed away" by people having money to spend ?

And I am prepared to bet when the results come in you'll be proven wrong - because we've been doing experiments like this for decades and you've been wrong EVERY OTHER TIME.

What WILL happen ? A tiny reduction in the workforce: caused by mothers taking extended maternity leave and young people who otherwise couldn't afford it going to get a college education. A massive drop in the unemployment rate as people who could never DARE risk it before suddenly are able to open their own businesses - and employ their neighbours. Increases in the people's average healthcare (with subsequent reduced costs for Canada's single payer healthcare) and a thousand other good things. Bad outcomes: none.
They did this exact same experiment, in Canada in the 1960s under the name MinCome. We know what the results were. There is no reason to believe they won't be replicated YET AGAIN as in all the the hundreds of other experiments that have been done in this regard for over 200 years now.
In all that time - there was exactly ONE experiment where a failure was reported, the report claimed an 'increase in sloth, lack of willingness to work, increased abuse of the bottle and sexual immorality'. It's an interesting case - since it was the first ever UBI experiment and it happened in England almost 200 years ago now to deal with the massive poverty the Industrial Revolution caused. It was also the very first example of a government commissioning a massive piece of research (over 15000 interviews) to build up a huge stack of big-data from which to draw a report in order to smartly evaluate a policy.
There's just one problem: the report was a complete fraud and fabrication. In fact, it was written BEFORE the interviews were even done by a bunch of fraudsters who just wrote what they thought probably would happen based on their own puritan belief systems. They never even READ the data they claimed their report was based on.
It would take over a century before anybody ever actually did. When they did - they discovered the exact OPPOSITE in the data from what the report said was in there - yet another resounding success.
That report even blamed the UBI for the worker's protest marches of 1821 - ignoring that these happened ALL OVER England, not just in the one little town where the UBI experiment happened.

The only experiment where UBI was EVER reported as anything but a massive economic and social success -was a flagrant fraud.