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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, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 11 2020, @02:45AM (40 children)
That last one is the real story behind the rest- security: no fear of hunger, no fear of losing your place to live. Really, I view UBI as the modern extension of Montesquieu:
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Offtopic) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 11 2020, @03:02AM (16 children)
Yeah, the problem is it doesn't work. See, money isn't worth a fixed value. It's valued by the amount of work done in your nation. If over a quarter of the workforce decide they'd just really rather not work if it's all the same to you, your money just decreased in value by over a quarter. Which means it takes an even larger percentage of your check to pay for all the things you want the government to spend money on, like roads, schools, healthcare, and subsidizing professional ass-sitters.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11 2020, @03:22AM (8 children)
On this website, a point about basic economics on an economic topic such as UBI gets modded "Offtopic"!
This place is fucking hopeless.
(Score: 2, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 11 2020, @03:25AM (6 children)
That's part of why everyone gets mod points, to correct the revenge mods of the butthurt.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11 2020, @07:01AM (3 children)
Ah, so that is why you run an army of sock puppets!
(Score: 5, Touché) by deimtee on Wednesday March 11 2020, @09:01AM (1 child)
I may disagree with his economic ideas, but you are just nuts. TMB runs the codebase, if he were inclined to cheat (and I don't think he is) he doesn't need sockpuppets. He could just put in a line:
If userid==18 Then MOD = +5 Fisherman;
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday March 12 2020, @03:29AM
Yup. Or write a script to insert bogus moderations from inactive users into the db to nuke any comment I don't like down to -1 by cid. Where's the fun in that though? I prefer to crush my enemies where everyone can see it. I mean, how am I supposed to enjoy listening to the lamentations of their women if they don't know to lament?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday March 12 2020, @03:22AM
Nope, only one person has ever sockpuppeted on SN. I wonder who that was...
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday March 11 2020, @03:25PM (1 child)
Wouldn't it be more efficient to cure the butthurt of the revenge mods?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday March 12 2020, @03:23AM
Can't be done.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11 2020, @03:25AM
One bad m0d point = FUCKING HOPELESS.
Great economics there, chief.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 11 2020, @03:28AM (4 children)
TFA didn't make it easy to extract, but employment didn't drop by 25% - 25% of those previously employed did go unemployed on UBI, but 18.1% of those previously unemployed found employment. If you read some of the anecdotes, they're trolling the bottom of the barrel economically speaking, with something over 1/3 unemployed to start, and something like 1/2 of those employed, employed precariously.
I hate to be this way, but: the value of a nation's economy isn't going to change much if your hookers stop running escort services and start working from home, or vice versa. On the other hand, when little old ladies can afford to get themselves a Chez lounge when they need one for health reasons, that might actually have a measurable impact on overall healthcare costs. On yet another hand, when your dumpster divers of the workforce get themselves out of those jobs and into something worthwhile - that should be an overall boost to the economy, even if the Uber drivers wise up and stay home to watch Netflix and get stoned more often.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by pTamok on Wednesday March 11 2020, @08:00AM (3 children)
This is not meant as a snarky comment, simply informative.
You may not realise it, but that is actually written as chaise longue: it is French, and means 'long chair [wikipedia.org]'.
Similarly, you might mean (benthic/bottom) trawling [wikipedia.org] rather than trolling [wikipedia.org] as a variation of the phrase 'scraping the bottom of the barrel [wiktionary.org]'.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 11 2020, @12:55PM
It looked wrong to me, but it's what the little old lady called it in her quote.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday March 11 2020, @07:11PM (1 child)
+5 grammar nazi (in a good non-snarky way).
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday March 11 2020, @08:14PM
Thank you.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by charon on Wednesday March 11 2020, @04:57AM
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11 2020, @05:05AM
You are wrong. I mean in the literal sense. You could very well be saying that the earth is flat. There is nothing to argue here. Instead of snarky reply and patting yourself on the back, incorporate that knowledge with the rest of what you understand and come up with a retort.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by coolgopher on Wednesday March 11 2020, @03:39AM (17 children)
I'm still waiting for someone to work out how UBI in the long run does not simply raise the cost of everything proportionate to the UBI. No small-scale trial is likely to encounter it, but if you go full-hog then you'd better have a plan for when it (in my view) inevitably happens...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11 2020, @05:01AM (2 children)
Agree.
It feels like UBI is an abstract solution to practical problems. What is THE PROBLEM? Let's fix that.
(Score: 2) by legont on Wednesday March 11 2020, @04:27PM
The problem is that ROBOTS ARE HERE.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11 2020, @06:02PM
it's just a con to get people completely dependent on government. no strings...for now.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Myfyr on Wednesday March 11 2020, @08:01AM (9 children)
IANAE, but here's my understanding:
It shouldn't raise the cost of most basic living expenses, because the free market still exists. There shouldn't be any general inflation, assuming it's not paid for by printing money, because the money supply in the economy hasn't increased. It's just redistribution (dirty word, I know). Anything not supply limited, and not in a monopoly or illegal price-fixing situation, should maintain whatever price competition has already set. The price of bread isn't going up, because any supplier who increases their price is going to be driven out of business by competition from all the cheaper suppliers. As I understand it, Econ 101; Demand for necessities isn't going up (people aren't going to suddenly eat more bread because they have more money), supply isn't going down, so the price should be stable.
I'm very much not an economist, so I have no idea what happens to the price of luxuries. Demand likely increases, but the extra demand should promote growth in those sectors, increasing supply etc. No clue where everything balances out to. I assume that, again, no increase in the money supply means no overall inflation, but I can't speak with any authority.
The main wrinkle in all this, as I see it, is housing. Land is supply limited, and bad government policy can easily cause that to result in housing being supply limited. Past experience shows that, at least under the current policy environment in Australia, when you give people money for housing, you just get inflation in the housing market. And housing is a big percentage of most people's expenses. So, although I'm a big fan of a UBI, I'm a bit wary of how the current housing market situation could prevent things working optimally. OTOH, that housing situation desperately needs fixing in most western economies, so maybe we should do that.
Actually, for the USA and it's utterly dysfunctional healthcare system, healthcare costs are also likely a major problem (no effective competition here). That definitely falls under the category of "REALLY need to fix that regardless."
There is some risk that if the percentage of people dropping out of the workforce is higher than expected under a full UBI, and the resulting productivity increases don't at least compensate for the decreased workforce, the economy would suffer. But that is a different problem to the original question,
I suspect, and more relevantly many economists suspect, that everything would be better than fine under a UBI. The productivity benefits, not to mention the happiness and moral benefits, likely outweigh the costs. Possibly by a significant margin. But it's very difficult to attach any certainty to that theory, even after small scale experiments like the one under discussion, so I doubt that any government is going to be brave enough to put it to the test.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by coolgopher on Wednesday March 11 2020, @08:26AM
The thing is, the free market doesn't guarantee that the prices reach some sort of floor. Rather, the free market converges on the ceiling - pulling out as much profit as the market can bear. And on the whole, we're greedy assholes (our at least we let the greedy assholes run the show).
Don't get me wrong, I'd quite enjoy a working UBI, but I just don't see it ever being viable. At least not under our current societal structures.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday March 11 2020, @09:14AM (3 children)
I don't think a UBI would raise house prices in the city. It is never going to be enough to buy a suburban house with. It might even drop them by getting some people to stay in the bush, reducing the rental market. Most of the kids I knew left our town to get jobs in the cities.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Jay on Wednesday March 11 2020, @08:21PM (2 children)
It's quite likely to revitalize small towns. A large percent of them are slowly dying out, all across america. The one I grew up in is on it's last generation or two before it's gone for good.
The problem is that as we've consolidated manufacturing (largely overseas) and started to have giant mega-monopolies for everything, there's just nothing bringing money into these towns. My grandfather used to work at a machine shop in town, and they sent the parts all up and down the Eastern seaboard. I forget what they made, but something fairly specialized. That place has been out of business for years now, and as soon as it went out of business a large amount of the money flowing into the town stopped.
Agriculture, manufacturing, and mining used to drive the economies of a lot of towns, even small ones. Now that's just not the case anymore. There are a lot of towns where all the buildings are falling down, because nobody has the money for maintenance. Same goes for the infrastructure. The kids move to the cities to actually have a life, and the parents live there until they die, with the town crumbling around them.
A lot of small towns just circulate what little money they have. You get a bit more, you go buy some construction supplies to finish part of your house. Now the hardware store made a bit more profit, so they decide to repave the parking lot. They pay the local guy to come do it, and he's now got a big customer that he didn't have before. He takes his couple hundred bucks and goes and buys a new fishing rod from the bait shop. And the bait shop guy, since he had a big ticket sale, takes the family out to eat at the local diner, and gives the waitress a good tip. She decides to get her hair done the next day with the money.
This sort of local monetary circulation is really an economic boost, and it's something you don't see as clearly when looking at larger towns and cities. If you injected a steady UBI into these small towns, it's going to likely have more of an impact than in large cities. Most of the people living in my hometown aren't going to take their UBI and go get a new iPhone, thus shipping the money off somewhere else. They're going to fix their truck or roof, and that keeps a lot more of those dollars local. A thousand people making a thousand dollars a month is a million dollars a month coming into a little town. That would make a huge impact.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Thursday March 12 2020, @01:53AM (1 child)
Okay, I can see that working for a little while, but in the long run? I still expect the inflationary pressures to return the situation to the current status quo.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday March 12 2020, @06:50AM
Inflation is due to increase in the money supply. Simplistically, money is backed by the assets of the state. Print more and you are dividing a set wealth by a larger number of dollars. The wealth doesn't change, the dollar gets smaller.
There are many economists who think that a small steady inflation is a good thing, but mostly it boils down to a redistributive effect of reducing the value of debt and held cash, and encouraging investment rather than wealth hoarding.
As long as the money supply isn't simply printed to fund it a UBI is not in itself inflationary. It is redistributive.
Personally I think the initial effects of a UBI would be fiscally fairly neutral, but it would have huge social, cultural, and environmental benefits. Those benefits would flow on to have very positive secondary effects.
Pushing to extremes, do you want to live in a society where a few trillionaires own everything and everyone else is in a brutal, wasteful, struggle for survival, a la Soylent Green(the movie) or one where people are free to contribute in whatever way they want, a la Star Trek?
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Gaaark on Wednesday March 11 2020, @11:09AM (1 child)
"The price of bread isn't going up, because any supplier who increases their price is going to be driven out of business by competition from all the cheaper suppliers."
That works in a Capitalist economy: what we have today is a sort of Neo-capitalism...you buy up all your competition (which the government allows because you've bought them) so there are really only 3 big suppliers. You then collude (which the government allows because...) to keep the price profitable for all 3.
Capitalism means INCREASED competition: today, the big 3-ish buy up their competition to fix prices/reduce services/reduce labour/keep salaries-hourly-rates low which the government supports with food stamps, etc.
I support Capitalism...which we do not have today.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2020, @03:09PM
But the price of bread is going up, both per loaf and per weight.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 11 2020, @01:07PM (1 child)
Unless all the cheaper suppliers go out of business because they're supplying below cost. The huge missing aspect here is cost. Just like employers can't demand and get free labor, so buyers of bread can't demand and get free bread.
Why would there be productivity increases? I sense a lot of unquestioned assumptions here.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Myfyr on Wednesday March 11 2020, @04:52PM
The cheaper suppliers aren't dropping their prices in this scenario, they just aren't increasing them, so the only reason they'd be supplying below cost would be if the costs increase. Since market competition applies to the inputs as well, I see no inherent reason why costs would necessarily increase (again, assuming a semi-functional free market which, as others have pointed out, may be an invalid assumption).
The possible exception here, which you may be alluding to, is potential labor cost increases due to decreased labor supply. Which is the point under discussion in TFA, and one of the main unanswered questions for the workability of a UBI; what, exactly, would be the impact of a UBI on labor supply? And nobody really knows. The Ontario pilot provides some, but not much, data on that point. Something concrete for the economists to argue about, at least.
It is my understanding that there is substantial evidence that a happier and/or less stressed workforce is more productive, which makes sense to me. Prolonged stress has definitely been shown to impair cognitive performance. I don't have any evidence to hand though, so while that assumption is not unquestioned, it is unsupported, at least here.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 11 2020, @01:27PM
For sure, free money means some things will be getting more expensive. No way in hell landlords will charge less than what people have in their pockets for rent.
On the other hand, right now we have a big divide between people who can pay and those who can't - so, you're looking at $800 down and $400 per month for a shitty apartment, vs $40 per night ($1200 per month) for a shitty hotel room, vs homeless shelters that are free if you're lucky enough to get one before the beds run out. With UBI (particularly UBI that's paid out in micro-increments like $0.025 per minute) I'd predict the rise of a new class of low cost housing in the range of $10 per night - it would look a lot like the homeless shelters do today, but would be supported by the users of the system's UBI rather than grants, donations, etc. With $1000 per month UBI every person "on the street" would be able to pay that $0.025 per minute, or about $10 for 8 hours. And, if they choose to work at the shelter, the shelter can afford to pay them for that work from the reliable per bed income...
Inflation is nothing new, and pumping an extra $1000 per month per head into the economy at the bottom end while taking it away across the scale isn't going to make it run away. I have always thought of UBI as a payroll tax, say it pays $1000 per month to everyone - always, but... when make any money above UBI, you pay a flat tax of - whatever keeps overall income taxes level with today's rates, just say 33%. So, by the time you're making $3000 per month above UBI, you're just paying back your UBI, but effectively keeping 100% of your income - another way of stating it would be people below $3000 per month income pay (receive) a negative income tax. By $6000 per month, your effective tax rate would be 1/2 of the tax rate - pretty close to today's average income tax.
Yang's proposal was to implement a VAT, which puts the burden on consumers - don't like taxes? don't buy anything, and a similar argument applies: those who buy less than the UBI level of newly taxed goods would benefit, while those who purchase more than that amount would be funding the system. I think this is a more politically palatable idea, but I question how it would go over in states that already have almost 10% sales tax.
There's a terrible political reality of: if the implementation is to be successful, it probably needs to roll out fast so it can't be squashed in the inevitable political backlash before it shows benefits, but... a fast rollout will have the biggest shocks to the economy - economically it would be much smoother to progressively ramp it up over 10 years or so.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday March 11 2020, @02:48PM (2 children)
BINGO!!! We have a winner! We have seen the same thing with welfare, of course. The more money Uncle Sam spends to ensure that everyone can afford a gallon of milk every day, the more expensive the milk gets. If Uncle spent no money buying groceries on all his illegitimate children, the price of commodities would drop. Drop a lot. And, while those prices were dropping, average working class families could improve the quality of their live, and have more money to spend, thereby creating more jobs.
Welfare tends to stagnate the economy, and society. UBI is just another welfare scheme.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday March 12 2020, @03:51AM (1 child)
The positive side of UBI would happen IF it replaced the entire gov't-welfare industry/bureaucracy. Of course, then you'd have a couple million useless people out of work, but, tradeoffs...
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @06:54AM
They could take the jobs of everyone who drops out of the workforce to live on the UBI. I think bureacrats are currently paid more than a UBI, so that is a net win.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 11 2020, @03:41AM (4 children)
Not even wrong. OTOH, his idea of separation of powers (as revealed in the sacred Wikipedia texts [wikipedia.org]), which implicitly accepts that we have good reason to be afraid of another, has a far better fit with reality.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 11 2020, @01:30PM (3 children)
But, is that fear necessary for a good quality of life?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 11 2020, @01:51PM (2 children)
Of course it is. Gullibility has a high cost when it comes to governance.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 11 2020, @05:01PM (1 child)
Careful how you read the Baron de Montesquieu, context and tone is important.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 13 2020, @12:03AM