SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 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.