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: 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.