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from the Having-UBI-would-afford-more-time-to-spend-supporting-SoylentNews dept.
The fine folks at the CBC bring us the following report:
Participants in Ontario's prematurely cancelled basic income pilot project were happier, healthier and continued working even though they were receiving money with no-strings attached.
That's according to a new report titled Southern Ontario's Basic Income Experience, which was compiled by researchers at McMaster and Ryerson University, in partnership with the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction.
The report shows nearly three-quarters of respondents who were working when the pilot project began kept at it despite receiving basic income.
That finding appears to contradict the criticism some levelled at the project, saying it would sap people's motivation to stay in the workforce or seek employment.
That's an interesting way of looking at it. An alternative viewpoint could be that over a quarter of the people who were working before the UBI trial stopped working. Unclear are the benefits that resulted from their new spare time — such as providing support to an ailing family member.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Wednesday March 11 2020, @02:12AM (12 children)
Previous reports on this particular experiment (it's not the first one in Ontario, btw) found that there were far vewer hospital visits, saving the public health care system serious coin. Single parents could stay home to watch their kids, go back to school to finish their high school education, and, as you pointed out, help take care of other family members.
Financial calculations by the opposition party (It was Doug Ford's Conservatives that cancelled the program) showed that, like the previous experiment, it paid for itself.
Same as cities have found it much cheaper to go with the "housing first" strategy of getting the homeless off the street and then tackling their other problems, because court time, police time, unpaid hospital bills, etc., costs more.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 11 2020, @02:39AM (10 children)
And how did the accounting for the complete lack of contribution to society by said ~30% who decided to say "Thanks, dumbasses! I'm gonna watch Oprah and eat bon-bons on your dime!" get mathed up? Currency isn't a limited quantity method of transferring work but work itself most certainly is finite; how do you think CA would fare if it suddenly started producing over a quarter less work nationally? Pro-tip: that means over a quarter less Other People's Money you have to spread around to people you feel bad for.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11 2020, @04:52AM (7 children)
You could probably easily make up that 30% from:
- chronically unemployed anyway
- no longer needed DSS employees
- less wasted time commuting due to traffic reductions
- improvements in efficiency due to only having motivated employees
- cutting out wasteful job-creation programs
You have some strange ideas about just how much slack there is in the system and indirect benefits. You could have half the workforce quit their jobs on UBI and if it resulted in less hospital visits, less spent on daycare, less on commuting, and more on people doing stuff for themselves, then there is a good chance that society would be better off overall.
That doesn't even take into account the social benefits of improved parenting, reduced stress, giving people the opportunity to attempt something without risking homelessness, and just the general social improvement of giving people the time to sit around and have philosophical discussions with friends.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11 2020, @07:27AM
Gotta have those freeways jammed to "create jobs" for helicopter pilots. They in turn need bad weather to "create jobs" for those who'll cut corners for celebrity clients.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by crafoo on Wednesday March 11 2020, @09:19AM (4 children)
So you're advocating for removing women from the workforce and promoting 2-parent households? You can achieve that without UBI.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday March 11 2020, @05:51PM (3 children)
'eh, we do that already. It'd be nice, if the wife got UBI for doing what she's already doing.
Still, I'm uncertain the pros outweigh the cons when it comes to UBI.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by crafoo on Wednesday March 11 2020, @06:31PM (2 children)
I'm not opposed to UBI if we could make it work financially. I think it would be a better system than the current welfare system, which would certainly have to be dismantled to pay for part of it. And of course, if it was applied Universally (as in, the U in UBI). I just don't see a way to make it work without: A) printing more money (inflation, essentially the same as a tax), raising income tax (which wouldn't be all that ethical IMO), or raising capital gains tax (which is unworkable as it would crash the economy).
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday March 11 2020, @06:54PM
Which is why I'd probably still vote against UBI. Now, if we wanted to cut the defense budget by say 25%, then we might could get somewhere. Just don't pull it from something like NASA . . .
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @12:33AM
There's a tax you're forgetting. D) Property tax, and particularly tax on the value of land (not improvements). That is to say, Georgism. [wikipedia.org]
Georgism proper is an interesting idea I can't quite bring myself to endorse*, but there's no doubt a UBI program supported by a partial land-value tax is far better than a UBI program supported by income tax etc..
*It strikes me as asymptotically correct in urban areas, but rather problematic in rural areas. An acre of land in Manhattan is quite valuable ($5M is the figure I recall), and almost all of that value is precisely because it's an acre of land in Manhattan. It's not unreasonable to play the "you didn't build that" card and suggest that the community as a whole is both more deserving of the profits resulting from that value than some rent-seeking landlord, and that it can make better use of them (i.e. maintaining all the infrastructure that makes cramming 100+ people per acre even survivable).
But an acre of shitty farmland in the Midwest may be worth only a few thousand, and may gain that much more value (to its present owner) because it was part of great grandfather's homestead. And the grow-or-die dictate you get when you combine returns to scale with a full Georgist land-value tax, seems to all but guarantee you'll find yourself selling the family homestead to be rolled into a larger, more efficient operation with no connection to it (your choice is whether to go broke paying taxes trying to keep it, or accept reality and sell quick). That certainly is an economically efficient outcome, but I still find it morally troubling.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Wednesday March 11 2020, @12:43PM
Let's review. Among people they determined employment status for (see pg 28 for the chart), before and after, 112 people were employed and 77 unemployed before the study began. That changed to 99 employed and 90 unemployed, meaning an additional 13 people became unemployed (23.9% employed became unemployed and 18.2% unemployed became employed).
Currently, Canadian labor force [tradingeconomics.com] participation is estimated to be 65.5% in February, 2020. A similar proportional movement between employed and unemployed status would result in employment participation dropping to 56%. Canadian labor force participation hasn't been that low in over 40 years (through to 1976 on the linked graph, which was the lowest labor force participation at roughly 61.5%). The shifts don't sound like much from the study of the story, but if it happened to the whole of Canada as it did in the study, it would result in an increase in unemployment by roughly 25%.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dry on Wednesday March 11 2020, @03:48PM
The figures I read were 28% of the employed and 24% of the unemployed went back to school of some type. There was a proportion that had abusive jobs quit.
The previous experiment in Dauphin Man. saw Mothers staying home with their kids instead of working and teenagers staying in school instead of going to work to help support the household.
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Wednesday March 11 2020, @09:23PM
If you actually read the report, only 9 people out of the 240 or so were not working when this ended. That summary fails to mention that about the same amount of people that weren't working when this started now have jobs. 40% of the people that quit working went on to school to better themselves for the rest of Canada.
Based on the study and how people restructured their lives, I'm not sure its proper to assume that those 9 people decided to quit working forever. It's possible that when this study ended they were transitioning between jobs, school, a sick relative or something else.
Lets suppose though that 9 people did decide to go on break for life, hole up and never help another human being. Should we discount that it significantly helped the other 231 people? Seems to me that we'd be throwing the baby out with the bathwater if we blindly made those assumptions.
It might be worth asking those 231 people that have better lives if they'd be happy to support the UBI for those 9 people if they were able to keep their own UBI, new education, better jobs and better economic situation.
Unfortunately the study did not come to any conclusions about whether or not this group was better off, the same, or a drag on the economy at the end.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TrentDavey on Thursday March 12 2020, @11:32PM
The Doug Ford Conservatives had to cancel the BI experiment on the very likely chance it show good results. Then they would have to "give people money for doin' nuttin"
The Conservatives would have blown a gasket and .lost. .their. .minds. !