A monthly universal basic income (UBI) empowered recipients and did not create idleness. They invested, became more entrepreneurial, and earned more. The common concern of “laziness” never materialized, as recipients did not work less nor drink more.
Well, no, we’ve never been able to test UBI. That would require the entire population of significant geographic areas to receive UBI levels of income in a way they start believing it’s a safe thing to expect for the foreseeable future, and to model how it’s funded rather than just how it pays out.
What we’ve done is frequently means test the experiments, deliberately select low income people, but only a tiny portion of a larger low income population. Also, the participants know very well that the experiment might be a few months or a year, but after that they’ll be on their own again, so they need to take any advantage it gives them. So all the experiments prove is that if you give some, but not all, low income people a temporary financial benefit, they can and will out compete others without the benefit.
UBI might be workable, or it might need certain other things to make it workable, or it might not be workable, but it’s going to be pretty much impossible to figure it out in a limited scope experiment.
The Alaska permanent fund is about as close to UBI as we’ve gotten, but the amounts are below sustenance living so it’s not up to the standard either.
What we’ve done is frequently means test the experiments, deliberately select low income people, but only a tiny portion of a larger low income population.
So what you’re saying it we explicitly looked at the most extreme examples and seen how UBI has greatly benefitted the people in those extreme situations, and every single time the experiments are conducted the results are pretty consistent, but we can’t extrapolate that it won’t work in less extreme situations because… reasons…
Because you still have the element of differential compared to others. In true UBI, the UBI recipient would represent the ‘low point’ for any citizen. Let’s take Seattle for example as they recent had an ‘experiment’ about UBI. If you had true UBI, then 750,000 people would all get same benefit, of which 75,000 were unemployed. In the UBI experiment, 100 of that 75,000 people had the benefit temporarily, and have an advantage over 74,900 people without that benefit, and the experiment only influences 0.01% of the population in general and then only by a meager amount, so the general local economy won’t even register the activity as a blip. Those 100 people can have a breather but know that time is short. So they take advantage to maybe take a class, get nice interview clothes, and show up better prepared for a job than maybe the other dozen applicants that couldn’t afford to buy the clothes, take time off for the right interview, or take that class. They might not have any particular advantage if everyone had UBI, and the experiment measured success in terms of relative success over those not in the cohort.
So we are missing:
What is the behavior if UBI is taken for granted as a long term benefit for the forseeable future, rather than a temporary benefit.
What is the competitive picture if 100% of the population have the same benefit rather than 0.01%. i.e. how much of it was success owing to better resources versus success owing to others needing to fail to allow that relative success.
What is the overall economic adjustment if 100% of the population has this income and participants in the economy may adjust
What does it look like when the funding model in terms of taxation resembles what is needed in a UBI
Just like all sorts of stuff in science, at scale does not necessarily map to small scale observations. Especially in economic and social science. That’s not to say UBI is definitely not going to work, it’s that we can’t know how it will work/not work until done “for real” at the appropriate scale.
It’s pretty typical, select a few people out of thousands to receive a temporary benefit and extrapolate to UBI. Sure they didn’t talk about the other population, but Internet search does generic demographics for the city (750k total/75k on unemployment).
I’m probably a minority but i would in a heartbeat. I stopped doing residential AC because the bills didn’t get paid that often (people just don’t like paying bills) and honestly i couldn’t compete with larger companies while still having to maintain my epa certs, gas reclamation charges and the cost of refrigerant alone .
UBI is to cover the basics, its not going to let everyone live in luxury, you’d still want for extra cash, you just wouldnt NEED it. Thus people would still be willing to work
I would love to learn to weld, be a mechanic, electrician… basically all the things I’ve had to pickup up in a triage capacity. I would love to give up my 9-5 rat race job and learn to do something beneficial well. I can’t justify the current expense of taking 18-24 months off to go back to school though when I make enough to stay alive at this point.
You are probably right, but at the same time we might be surprised. UBI becomes the catalyst for this experiment to take off though.
UBI is generally proposed as a basic sustenance income, a fairly austere lifestyle that is “enough” but likely not fulfilling.
Of course if you don’t have enough “work” to go around, that vision of UBI becomes pretty dystopian, as some people are stuck with bare bones living with zero opportunity for better. If we do get there, then that sort UBI isn’t going to be enough, but as you say it it’s too much and you still need human work some, well, is a tough question…
I highly doubt most people are just going to pick up a trade as if it is a hobby if they are getting a UBI
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I know this is a popular perception, but it doesn’t allign with the results of experiments where random citizens were granted an UBI.
https://www.givedirectly.org/2023-ubi-results/
Huh would you look at that, in the UBI experiments it actually gave people more freedom to do the kind of work they wanted to do.
Mein gott, such a terrible policy.
Well, no, we’ve never been able to test UBI. That would require the entire population of significant geographic areas to receive UBI levels of income in a way they start believing it’s a safe thing to expect for the foreseeable future, and to model how it’s funded rather than just how it pays out.
What we’ve done is frequently means test the experiments, deliberately select low income people, but only a tiny portion of a larger low income population. Also, the participants know very well that the experiment might be a few months or a year, but after that they’ll be on their own again, so they need to take any advantage it gives them. So all the experiments prove is that if you give some, but not all, low income people a temporary financial benefit, they can and will out compete others without the benefit.
UBI might be workable, or it might need certain other things to make it workable, or it might not be workable, but it’s going to be pretty much impossible to figure it out in a limited scope experiment.
The Alaska permanent fund is about as close to UBI as we’ve gotten, but the amounts are below sustenance living so it’s not up to the standard either.
So what you’re saying it we explicitly looked at the most extreme examples and seen how UBI has greatly benefitted the people in those extreme situations, and every single time the experiments are conducted the results are pretty consistent, but we can’t extrapolate that it won’t work in less extreme situations because… reasons…
Because you still have the element of differential compared to others. In true UBI, the UBI recipient would represent the ‘low point’ for any citizen. Let’s take Seattle for example as they recent had an ‘experiment’ about UBI. If you had true UBI, then 750,000 people would all get same benefit, of which 75,000 were unemployed. In the UBI experiment, 100 of that 75,000 people had the benefit temporarily, and have an advantage over 74,900 people without that benefit, and the experiment only influences 0.01% of the population in general and then only by a meager amount, so the general local economy won’t even register the activity as a blip. Those 100 people can have a breather but know that time is short. So they take advantage to maybe take a class, get nice interview clothes, and show up better prepared for a job than maybe the other dozen applicants that couldn’t afford to buy the clothes, take time off for the right interview, or take that class. They might not have any particular advantage if everyone had UBI, and the experiment measured success in terms of relative success over those not in the cohort.
So we are missing:
Just like all sorts of stuff in science, at scale does not necessarily map to small scale observations. Especially in economic and social science. That’s not to say UBI is definitely not going to work, it’s that we can’t know how it will work/not work until done “for real” at the appropriate scale.
I’m gonna need citations if you’re going to make claims about the data of experiments.
Well, here is the Seattle one: https://www.businessinsider.com/seattle-ubi-guaranteed-basic-income-low-income-poverty-housing-employment-2024-4
It’s pretty typical, select a few people out of thousands to receive a temporary benefit and extrapolate to UBI. Sure they didn’t talk about the other population, but Internet search does generic demographics for the city (750k total/75k on unemployment).
Cool. And here are 150+ other experiments and program of varying sizes and time frames pretty much all with generally positive results.
https://basicincome.stanford.edu/experiments-map/
It seems to me like there actually is quite a lot of data to support the claim that UBI is consistently good when implemented.
Or maybe Meta Analysis is more convincing.
https://basicincome.stanford.edu/uploads/Umbrella Review BI_final.pdf
Page 15 is rather quite enlightening.
have you like, ever seen people in retirement? they start doing labour just to entertain themselves.
I’m probably a minority but i would in a heartbeat. I stopped doing residential AC because the bills didn’t get paid that often (people just don’t like paying bills) and honestly i couldn’t compete with larger companies while still having to maintain my epa certs, gas reclamation charges and the cost of refrigerant alone .
UBI is to cover the basics, its not going to let everyone live in luxury, you’d still want for extra cash, you just wouldnt NEED it. Thus people would still be willing to work
I would love to learn to weld, be a mechanic, electrician… basically all the things I’ve had to pickup up in a triage capacity. I would love to give up my 9-5 rat race job and learn to do something beneficial well. I can’t justify the current expense of taking 18-24 months off to go back to school though when I make enough to stay alive at this point.
You are probably right, but at the same time we might be surprised. UBI becomes the catalyst for this experiment to take off though.
UBI is generally proposed as a basic sustenance income, a fairly austere lifestyle that is “enough” but likely not fulfilling.
Of course if you don’t have enough “work” to go around, that vision of UBI becomes pretty dystopian, as some people are stuck with bare bones living with zero opportunity for better. If we do get there, then that sort UBI isn’t going to be enough, but as you say it it’s too much and you still need human work some, well, is a tough question…