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A New Report Finds No Evidence That People Will Work Less Under a Universal Basic Income (theoutline.com)
Economists Djavad Salehi-Isfahani and Mohammad H. Mostafavi-Dehzooeifrom for the Economic Research Forum have released a new report on the results of a basic income scheme launched in Iran in 2011. "In 2011, in response to heavy cuts to oil and gas subsidies, Iran implemented a program that guaranteed citizens cash payments of 29 percent of the nation's median income, which amounts to about $1.50 every day (about $16,000 per year in the U.S.)," reports The Outline. Here are the key findings: The report found no evidence for the idea that people will work less under a universal income, and found that in some cases, like in the service industry, people worked more, expanding their businesses or pursuing more satisfying lines of work. The researchers did find that young people -- specifically people in their twenties -- worked less, but noted that Iran never had a high level of employment among young people, and that they were likely enrolling in school with the added income. The evidence presented in the paper is compelling, but the anecdotal belief that handing people money will make them lazy is hard to shake. "The findings in this paper do not settle this question," the report's authors point out. "What we have accomplished is at the very least to shift the burden of proof on this issue to those who claim cash transfer [sic] make poor people lazy, and to show the need for better data and more research."
It seems obvious that if people can do something they will, but what? Who knows. Hobby or Job, or accidental community service via picking up trash.
per year extra hell yah I'd still work (Mind you I own my own business) but still $1200 extra per month is a lot of money to do things lots of people wouldn't be able to do other wise. Hell with $1200 extra I could use that to run a second online business.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
The argument against basic income is not about laziness, it's where the money comes from. Gather 5 of your friends and implement basic income. Those who earn less than the BI gets paid by money collected from those who earn more than the BI. Post back the results. Do it among 10, 20, or 30 of friends, all without the need for any government or politicians. Good luck.
$1.50 x 365 = $547.50 Nowhere near $16K
Somebody learned math using common core techniques ..... and failed miserably.
I'm still not sold.
Nor should you be. Finding no evidence that X is true is very different (and much easier) than finding evidence that X is false.
Slashdot headline reads "A New Report Finds No Evidence That People Will Work Less Under a Universal Basic Income" yet quoted in the article "The researchers did find that young people - specifically people in their twenties - worked less"
Sooo... yea. I realize Slashdot has become a new social justice platform but c'mon, this is at least the third universal basic income propaganda post of the week and it's certainly stretching the boundaries of legitimate.
I also thought this until I retired. I do more now than I did when I was working. And more of that work actually does something for my community. No, I don't put in the "hours" like a wage slave, but the work is more productive and meaningful and fun for me.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If anything, employers will need to raise salaries, since potential employees will have less incentive to work.
Employers would need to get better in all parts. When the populace no longer fears for their lives upon losing their job, they would be far more apt to quit a shitty job to find something better. Over a generation or two it'd weed out bad businesses, making the country more efficient with higher quality output and faster economic growth.
But I don't know what I'm talking about. Walmart would probably find a way to game the system like do currently.
You've got cause and effect backwards. People largely abuse drugs and alcohol to cope with things like their shitty jobs.
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No, but realize it also goes the other way too. I'm a biomedical researcher, I'll likely make more money quitting cutting edge research at a university and going into pharmecutical work. I'll be doing stuff that will have less risk of failing, but also has very little chance of being a big breakthrough. I'd love to continue doing what I am now, but I can't due to salary reasons. If money weren't an issue, I'd keep doing the high risk/high reward science as I am now.
My job puts food on the table and a roof over my head, sure, but I'm working mainly to accomplish stuff I can take pride in. If the necessities were guaranteed, I think plenty of people would take riskier work in order to feel accomplished.
Except that one big problem with our current welfare system is that if you work, you lose welfare benefits, and this creates a disincentive against working. A Universal Basic Income would come with no such restrictions.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
I might work less at my current job. That doesn't mean I would sit on my butt and watch Netflix all day.
I've actually had periods where I wasn't employed for a reasonable stretch of time. Sure, I did a bunch of video gaming at first, but pretty soon I got bored and restless, and needed to find something productive to do. So yes, I'd find something useful to occupy my time. I might not be punching a clock at a corporate office, though - I might start doing independent hacking and vulnerability research for instance. I might set out coding new apps, or other such things. I might do something entirely different like learn more about automotive computer networks. But I sure wouldn't be idle.
There was no evidence that people who got paid some cash allowance didn't work, except for the age group where the amount was material (the young).
That's quite a different conclusion than the headline would suggest.
That right there is the fly in the ointment. Simply working isn't enough. You have to do work producing something other people want, not necessarily what you want. Work has value because it produces something other members of society are demanding. If a UBI allows you to quit a productive job in order to start an unproductive one (e.g. artist), the net result is that the country's productivity decreases, and the standard of living drops. (Which means the UBI has to be increased to keep it at the level of "basic", starting a vicious cycle of continuing productivity declines and UBI increases.)
As an extreme example, nobody wants to collect garbage, repair toilets, clean septic tanks, etc. But because it's needed, society pays a lot for it - enough to entice some individuals to live with the stink and do it for a living. If a UBI causes some of these people to quit and take up more "satisfying" lines of work, the prices of these services will go up, resulting in less income available for people to spend on other things, resulting in the UBI not buying as much as it used to, resulting in the government increasing the UBI to compensate for its decreased purchasing power, resulting in more people switching to more "satisfying" work, resulting in more prices going up, etc.
The economy wants to price things according to how much society values it. Attempting to thwart that with a UBI or minimum wage doesn't make that tendency disappear. The economy just interprets that as damage to the system, and routes around it - by devaluing the currency to lessen the impact of the fixed value of the UBI or minimum wage on prices.
"What we have accomplished is at the very least to shift the burden of proof on this issue to those who claim cash transfer [sic] make poor people lazy,
No you/they haven't. Burden of proof to support a costly program or scheme does not work that way: You have the burden, and your concept doesn't have merit until you've proven it ---- showing a little bit of evidence doesn't change the burden of proof to someone else's. The burden of proof remains to show that Universal Basic Income provides more value than it costs in order to justify this radical scheme.
As for the evidence that providing Food or resources without having to work for it promotes Laziness or failing results ---- the strong exemplars of this happening are readily available throughout history. Communism/Socialism to any degree reduces production and doesn't create sustainable economies; history's littered with numerous examples...
yea becouse I'd believe anything coming out of Iran ... not. /. is really stretching here.
Right. I mean, they probably even disregard the scientific method and still fight over things like whether global warming and evolution are real.
Real lawyers write in C++
Yes, the people trying to make a living with streams and videos will certainly increase. But I doubt that the low paying jobs will go. Rather, they will get cheaper for the employers and you will deal with a LOT higher fluctuation. Which isn't really a problem because, well, how much training time do you need for someone who sweeps your floors or stocks your shelves?
What you'll have is people who want to buy something and need money for it that they don't have with UBI alone, so they'll go and work for a week or two. As an employer, you'll probably have to pay less, too, because now they only want "extra" money from you, not the money they need to sustain themselves.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... also another major point is that Venezuela has had an unprecedented drought that's stuck since 2013. That's not hard to check out, and it's crippled agriculture. Coupled with the sustained drop in oil prices, these two factors have in fact devastated food production and imports simultaneously.
The other side of the coin is in fact a thing called "price controls" and those aren't necessarily a socialist measure, they're a tactic used by many governments when inflation is getting out of hand. This is the really big mistake Maduro made. Price controls cause a discrepancy between the official price and the black market price, leading to hoarding and speculation, which causes further inflation, and necessitates rationing of the controlled-price good, thus leading to long queues. The insidious thing about price controls is that they *create* shortages even if there's plenty of production, because they can create a speculative bubble in the price-controlled asset.
Saying that the "greater something" is more important than individual rights is leftist now? "You are nothing, your people is everything" and all that?
Wow, and they told me at school that Fascism was a right wing ideology...
Please understand finally that extremism wants to take your liberties. Left or right doesn't really matter here, any extremist ideology puts the ideology over your personal freedoms.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You're totally ignoring the inflation that would happen when people suddenly have this "extra" money.
You mean like when a bunch of young men get drafted to go shoot at the Communists?
Oh yes, the old Not Real Socialism (TM) argument! So you're saying it's not socialism even though the state STOLE the means of production from private owners (namely oil production capital), what other definition of socialism is there? I can see arguing UBI isn't socialism (it is), but Venezuela is 100% without a doubt socialist, you have to be horribly disingenuous to suggest otherwise. I'm sure when times were good you bragged about how great socialism was in Venezuela. No, once again you have a socialist state seizing production, over consuming and failing to invest in maintaining their stolen capital, only to have their production capacity eventually collapse and everyone starves. How many more times does this need to happen, and how many more people need to die before people understand socialism will never, ever work? Your selfish desire for other people's stuff has already killed many millions of people, how many more need to suffer before we can all accept socialism is horrible? These aren't flukes, this outcome was predicted by economists in the 19th century, long before socialism was ever tried, and it should be fucking obvious to anyone with even the most basic understanding of econ and capital. And if you think this was just the result of mismanagement, I suggest you read up on the price system and why centralized control ALWAYS fails. Just like fascism, socialism is a garbage populist ideology that might sound good on paper to uneducated idiots, but winds up causing endless death and destruction in practice.
and that they were likely enrolling in school with the added income
That single line torpedoes their entire "study". To rephrase the article summary in more honest words: "we found that people did work less, but we're just going to assume that they're going to school instead".
You can prove anything you want when you're willing to hand-wave away any data you don't like.
UBI doesn't make vast amounts of money for comfortable living appear out of thin air. 29% of the average US household take-home income is under $14k. The poverty line in the US is around $22k.
UBI offers a replacement for welfare, social security, minimum wages, unemployment insurance, and countless other things. Total combined welfare in the US ranged from $16984 (Mississippi) to $49175 (Hawaii) in 2013 (everything from direct payments to assistance for food, housing, energy, etc, both federal and state), according to the conservative Cato Institute. Social Security in the US averages $16k. Minimum wage is $15.1k. Etc. So keep those numbers in perspective. To put $14k a different way, that's $1167 per month - and given that a household is not supposed to spend more than 30% of their income on rent (greater than 30% is defined as "rent burdened"), that would suggest a rent of no more than $350 per month. And we're talking household income here, not individual. And that's income that would be without other added assistance (food, housing, etc), unless your goal is to double up the welfare system rather than replace it.
The big difference with today's welfare patchworks is that UBI is far more efficient (no huge bureaucratic mess, no "hoops" for people to jump through to prove qualifications, etc), doesn't have "cracks" for people to fall through. doesn't have any "cliffs" that disincentivize people to work further, etc. You don't "lose benefits" by working more - any extra work you do is extra income. To move you from poverty wages (UBI) to having the resources to not have to live in a dump, to be able to afford a vehicle, electronics, whatever it is that you enjoy in life. And if you really are the rare sort of person who actually likes living on poverty wages rather than working... well, that probably already describes your situation today.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
Because your drinking may cause you to lose your shitty job, or the stress/boredom of not being able to move forward socially or accomplish goals can drive you to drinking. Hence, why alcoholism and opioid addiction are often found in towns where industry has died.
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Why are you still talking as if the GP was talking about employer-provided incentives when the GP was very clearly talking about personal incentives? It's almost looking as if you were trying to make a point about something else and decided to inject it into the conversation here because someone used a word you felt you could chain off of.
And yes, low-end wages can be expected to go down with UBI - as they should. Minimum wage should disappear, because it's just one of the many pieces of a patchwork currently in use to approximate a UBI. In turn, corporate tax rates can rise (compensating for the windfall to employers for not having to pay as much), in turn helping pay for the UBI.
That said, your notion that people would tend to only try to work up to $1200/mo take-home income (far below the US poverty line) is silly. And contradicted by the study that forms the basis of this Slashdot article.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
There are also certain sectors of the population where, with enough children, a person simply MAKES more off welfare and benefits than they could possibly make off even a decently paying job.
And it's seeing cases like this that we know welfare for the truly broken system it is.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Salaries will drop, such that the personal incentives for work stay just as modest as they are now.
Not necessarily. Salaries will only drop if people are willing to work for less, which is not a given. A possibility equal to your scenario is that, with UBI place, people who feel more secure when employment lapses will not be willing to work for less and will demand more. Also possible, as the article alluded to, is people who feel they are not offered high enough wages may be more able to seek education or training so that they can move into a new job market that pays more, which would put upward pressure on wages. Markets are complicated.
Please provide your data on this. Until such data and valid studies paid for by truly non-biased parties comes to this conclusion and is brought to the discussion, I've no choice but assume you've bought into the anecdotal and patently false Republican claim of the 'Welfare Queen' syndrome that is apparently rampant across the US; and therefore I must assume your opinion is invalid.
To battle anecdote with anecdote: When I was injured and lost my ability to work for years while battling workman's comp I had to jump through legal hoops providing documentation to not only get on public assistance services (Food Stamps, utility assistance, and that's it), but I had to consistently jump through those same hoops every 3 months to stay the fuck on it. Because of how difficult the bureaucracy makes it to get and stay on a minimum of assistance, I cannot fathom the leaps in logic necessary to think that 'welfare queens' are even fucking possible in reality.
FYI, once I got Workman's comp to come to a settlement finally, I used the funds to retrain into a field not hindered by my newfound disability; and doing quite well at it, making 6 times the amount that the government provided and went out of its way to make me feel like a goddamn convict for even requesting it.
TL;DR: STFU asshole!
Part of the problem is that once you get a job benefits stop entirely. So if you don't get a job that pays enough, you're better off not working at all.
We could fix this by simply having benefits reduce in accordance with income rather than having them cutoff entirely.