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Study: Basic income would not reduce people's willingness to work:
A basic income would not necessarily mean that people would work less. This is the conclusion of a series of behavioral experiments by cognitive psychologist Fenna Poletiek, social psychologist Erik de Kwaadsteniet and cognitive psychologist Bastiaan Vuyk. They also found indications that people with a basic income are more likely to find a job that suits them better.
The psychologists received a grant from the FNV union to research the behavioral effects of a basic income. They simulated the reward structure of different forms of social security in an experiment. "We got people to do a task on a computer," says De Kwaadsteniet. "In multiple rounds, which represented the months they had to work, they did a boring task in which they had to put points on a bar. The more of these they did, the more money they earned."
The psychologists researched three different conditions: no social security, a conditional benefits system and an unconditional basic income. De Kwaadsteniet: "In the condition without social security, the test participants didn't receive a basic sum. In the benefits condition they received a basic sum, which they lost as soon as they started working. In the basic income condition they received the same basic sum but didn't lose this when they started work."
The basic income did not cause a reduction in the participants' willingness to work and efforts, say the psychologists. Nor did their salary expectations increase. "In the discussion on a basic income, it's sometimes said that people will sit around doing nothing if you give them free money," says Poletiek, who saw no indications of such a behavioral effect.
What would you do if you were to receive a basic income?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 24 2022, @06:26PM
Not really. A lot of manual labour is done by mexicans, but in actual fact on the scale of what we're considering, the bulk is actually done by machinery - particularly relevant when we're considering the context of asset taxation balanced against labour subsidies. If you're ploughing a 10 acre field, you're not running a gang of a hundred workers with mattocks. You're running a tractor with dozens of horsepower at least, probably more - and that only increases with scale. The question isn't whether you have american workers or mexicans (who, if here legally, would be eligible for the UBI otherwise what the hell would the point be?) but whether you have a quarter million dollar tractor run by one farmer, or a farmer, overseers, managers, and hundreds of workers turning the same soil. The argument is unchanged whether they're using mattocks, shovels or broadforks, and only slightly altered by a discussion of horses and oxen.
You should also check figures for NY and MA and others who were using those numbers to complain very loudly indeed about SALT deductions and people leaving for places like FL during the time of COVID-19 owing to the potential for remote work - but this is really a distraction from the main event, so to speak, where you're missing the ways that migration happens in business terms without people necessarily moving their domiciles. Microsoft isn't established in Washington - as I recall it's a Nevada corporation. Think of all the Delaware corporations out there. Remember the argument about Boeing moving 787 construction to SC. Ascribing it to burdensome regulations is to obscure the fact that it amounts to a drag on what people want to achieve. This is why companies go location-shopping. Even in cases where old businesses stay put, that doesn't mean that new branches or departments or spin-offs stay in the same place. This is why Austin is booming, for example. All you're doing here is quibbling about the margins on a well-established pattern that recent events threw into sharp relief. But let's ask ourselves: if 1% of people will leave a country where they feel unwelcome for reasons of taxation/regulation/cosmic butthurt at a given level, would you expect that proportion to change if you were to increase the degree of taxation, regulation or cosmic butthurt? Not every jew who could, left the Third Reich - and many of them paid dearly for it. But out-migration was definitely a strong factor.
Capital controls can work up to a point. But they don't convert your population into land-bound serfs by themselves either. All you're doing is slowing a determined outbound trickle. (Again, just look at the case of Argentina, desperate to control outbound flow and yet unable to entirely stop it especially in the light of a strong black market.) Want to find a rich venezuelan? You can, but not many of them are left in Venezuela any more. Try Miami instead. However, capital controls do impose substantial costs on business because they're an active deterrent to inbound capital flows; if you turn your country into a roach motel for money, financiers notice that and respond accordingly.
I agree that it depends strongly on what you call a UBI, but the problem then comes down to what the putative benefits are. The generally advertised benefits are: a reduction in the complexity of the social safety net, liberation from bullshit jobs, elimination of absolute poverty. This leads us directly to: if you're reducing the complexity of the social safety net, that's because you're replacing it. $$$ If you're liberating people from bullshit jobs it's because you're supporting them without those jobs. $$$ If you're eliminating absolute poverty, it's because what you're providing matches that baseline of expense. $$$. It's really that simple. If you're not paying people enough to live independently, it doesn't fit those criteria. End of story; there really isn't a lot of wiggle room. You could argue that the unemployed of the San Francisco meatpacking district should move somewhere else because you're not paying that level of UBI to them just because of local costs (ditto other expensive places such as Manhattan, downtown Seattle, DC and so on), but even if they're in a trailer park in the unfashionable end of MO, the net delivery of food, housing, clothing and medical care is tens of thousands of dollars per person, per annum, on average. As observed before, you do not and can not know ahead of time who will require how much support, so you have to pay it all to everyone for it to be universal, regardless of clawbacks through tax. This means a headline expense of 6 trillion or more, every year, in the USA. If you're not paying that much, you don't get the advertised benefits. You get Joe Sixpack some cash to pay for his next sixpack. This has nothing to do with political preference, and everything to do with believing that the proponents of UBI mean what they say.
Sure, they can both happen. Both would suck. Governments make stupid decisions all the time, which is why South Africa has load shedding and has given up on being the world's leader in mineral extraction, and why the past president (Mbeki? I forget.) called the educated people who were leaving, traitors. This is why India is trying to back away from some of the more aggressively anti-business stances and regulations, and is trying (with success it would be generous to call "mixed") to tempt its entrepreneurial diaspora back.