We already have something that resembles a basic income in developed countries. It's called retirement pensions. And what we see there is that most people, as soon as they are eligible for their pension, they stop working. Sure, they may volunteer a few hours a month here and there, but their productivity plummets compared to the previous year when they didn't collect that pension. I don't blame them one bit -- it's exactly the same thing I did once I retired.
So what happens as we lower the age at which they receive a pension? Different countries and companies have sometimes offered pensions to some of their senior workers to reduce their workforce -- the results were the same. Most people stop working as soon as they have a lifetime guaranteed income that allows them to afford life's essentials, even if they are in their forties.
A pilot where the participants know or suspect that the money will soon stop flowing won't capture the real-world effect of this decades-long experiment that we call pensions.
And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained?
> A pilot where the participants know or suspect that the money will soon stop flowing won't capture the real-world effect of this decades-long experiment that we call pensions.
There is a big difference in getting a guaranteed income in your 20’s vs your 60’s.
In your 20’s it unlocks taking big risks and swing for the fences. YC bets in this, for example. What can ambitious kids do when they don’t need to worry about money?
But when you’ve been grinding for 40 years … yeah for sure most people stop working.
> But when you’ve been grinding for 40 years … yeah for sure most people stop working.
I’d like to emphasize “grinding” here. For many it’s a grind in the truest sense, involving decades of backbreaking physical work. For others it’s immense stress to keep a roof over their family’s head no matter what. By the time retirement rolls around practically everybody has been burned out to some degree but had to power through regardless simply because quitting wasn’t an option.
Yeah, under conditions like that, people are indeed going to stop working the very second they’re no longer required to in order to survive. Things like UBI, 4-day work weeks, remote work, and fair compensation would all improve that situation measurably.
I think Universal Healthcare does this too. I just turned 40 and I would be WAY more interested in jumping jobs if it existed. Instead I keep on because my wife is going back to school and such, so everything relies on me.
> Instead I keep on because my wife is going back to school and such, so everything relies on me.
This has been so apparent to me over the last 20 years. I've seen so many people who wanted to switch jobs - perhaps a move to other parts of the country for a new job - but are very tied to employer-provided insurance. People with family members with varying health issues often feel especially 'stuck' to particular jobs because of the 'good' insurance, perhaps tied to specific regional hospitals with specific networks of doctors and specialists. I've heard this from multiple colleagues over the years and it's so disheartening. We've got so much unlocked human potential, and we get tied to specific areas because of arbitrary self-imposed constraints. Self-imposed I mean on ourselves as a whole, not individually-imposed.
So so so disheartening...
This is by design. The USA pairing healthcare to your job was on purpose.
Technically it was because businesses were banned from raising wages during WW2 but benefits were exempt.
Boom!
Just anecdata.
I stopped when I was 55 (didn't have a choice, actually). Fortunately, I had saved wisely, and lived frugally, so I was able to stop working (which was good, because no one wanted me, anyway).
I actually get more done, every day (like, seven days a week), than I did when getting paid.
ToMAYto, ToMAHto...
> In your 20’s it unlocks taking big risks and swing for the fences.
I think it is really common for retiree risk takers to swing for the fences in their 60's.
Their time is freed up and often lump sums become available: retirees often feel they need to make money to live well in retirement. I'm sure you can think of cliched coffee shop entrepreneurs, restaurant owners, franchise purchasers and investment property purchasers.
The reason it's such a well known cliche is because of how often they get burnt (due to poor understanding of risks) and many lose their homes.
I really notice it because I'm nearer retirement than 20 (they're not my peers but my acquaintances span a wide range of age and money demographics).
> In your 20’s it unlocks taking big risks and swing for the fences. YC bets in this, for example. What can ambitious kids do when they don’t need to worry about money?
That might be true for maybe 5-10% of 20-somethings. The rest will blow it.
> That might be true for maybe 5-10% of 20-somethings. The rest will blow it.
It feels like everyone that has an anti-UBI position has access to a lot of research that no one else can see - or they're just unwilling to read or accept the results of every study / bit of research actually done on the topic.
There isn't research done on UBI.
Either it is never universal, and / or participants know that it isn't going to last long (limited duration study) so they have different motivations than someone who will actually receive UBI.
Every study basically has the same (obvious and not useful) conclusion: people like getting money. Any conclusion beyond that (specific to UBI) isn't supported.
I know a universal one.
One is Alaska’s Permanent Fund. Look at their gini index among all 50 states since the fund launched.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pop4.398
And the conclusions are similar. Better health. Lower inequality
The other is Manitoba’s MINCOME experiment, they randomly selected people — it was doing very well but somehow the powers that be pulled the plug: https://humanrights.ca/story/manitobas-mincome-experiment
I think the issue is that it'd be really hard to test experimentally. Basically you'd have to give a select group of people UBI for life and do a 40+ year long longitudinal study.
Do you have data to back this up?
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I agree with your viewpoint, but this response is dismissive and doesn’t sincerely engage in the discussion. It does a disservice to your argument.
The answer to the question you asked is the article these comments are attached to.
So just so I'm clear: because some people, somewhere, will take UBI and blow it on college beer parties, which definitely won't happen otherwise, but because of that, every person who doesn't grow up at least semi-privileged gets the on-ramp directly onto the lifetime debt treadmill?
they're just parroting the "welfare queen" myth.
>In your 20’s it unlocks taking big risks and swing for the fences.
In your 20s it might also unlock travel and adventure.
The current proposals and tests are not about that kind of money. It is in the word 'basic': you can buy food and and a small room, not 'travel and adventure'.
> Some of them can't even figure out how to spend SNAP, because there's no refrigator or pantry in the stairwell they sleep in! I had a friend who insisted on spending 100% SNAP on 100% fresh beef. He literally wouldn't eat anything else. Jeez.
Isn't this making the argument in favor of a UBI? The theory behind SNAP is they have to buy food instead of stupid things, but then they just buy stupid food.
Meanwhile someone who is actually having a hard time gets put in a bind because they'd otherwise be willing to eat day old bagels and whatever's on the menu at the soup kitchen in order to save up for what they really need, which is the deposit for an apartment. But you can't use SNAP for that and then the government is paying the same money for worse results.
If you can buy food and a small room, you can buy food and petrol for your van. If you already own a bike, a biking holiday can now be your permanent lifestyle.
Sure, those people exist, that is fine. Some people do that now and far beyond their 20s: just hitch/bike/van around and do the odd job for a few days and live off that the rest of the time. There are communities where I live who allow anyone to come in and clean and cook together so you can stay and eat for $0. That is without basic income so it will happen with too. Thats a tiny minority. Most will get bored, loney, fed up etc if they even 'dare' to start such a life.
Ok, but thats "travel and adventure". Travel and adventure are demonstrably available to people who arent rich.
"Tiny Minority" until you no longer need a job to maintain the lifestyle. A non zero amount of people will go from not traveling, to traveling.
This is neither a criticism nor endorsement of UBI. Its just an observation.
Also, how is it bad to have such people? These are the people who go on to write interesting books or bring a different perspective to society than the one in which everyone lives the same life.
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Or prices will just rise.
Not UBI but this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_GLfxaYTYI) shows (claims) rent always rises to suck up available money. Why? Not because landlords are evil, no, because once people have more money many of them want a nicer place. There are a limited number of nicer places so the prices rise since all these new people with a little more money bid up what they're willing to pay.
The same will be true of UBI and anything you think it enables. There are limited number of planes, boats, hotels, hostels so the moment everyone can do it is the moment there's more demand than supply and prices will go up.
The larger point is that it's not about if you get UBI. It's about if everyone gets UBI
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> It's called retirement pensions. And what we see there is that most people, as soon as they are eligible ...
This feels like a bizarre take on quite a different arrangement.
That demographic has planned for ~40 years for tha transition, and in many cases is strongly encouraged by their industry / government / superannuation scheme, etc - to stop working at that age.
Extrapolating that back to providing a safety net to 20-40yo's just seems to miss everything about UBI - unless it's a 'I didn't have this, so no one else should' position?
All the research we're seeing - in very small, time-boxed, precarious trials - indicate that we'll probably get a positive result out of implementing this more broadly, without a drop-dead date attached.
The counter-argument always seems to be 'Oh, but we might not...' (and then some opinions).
> Extrapolating that back to providing a safety net to 20-40yo's just seems to miss everything about UBI - unless it's a 'I didn't have this, so no one else should' position?
Quite the opposite. I basically retired at 40. A few of my coworkers did the same. Most people, when given the means to quit working, choose to retire.
Most people don't retire at age X because they have reached age X, they do it because they finally are eligible for a pension.
Most my friends and myself could retire after the 90s Internet boom: we all sold. Most before 30. No one did as its boring. Travelling gets boring: everything I see rich people typically do I still find boring now in my 50s and I could've done all of that for the past 25+ years. I am quite sure I will never stop working and this seems the same for my friend group. I am not saying life satisfaction comes from work necessarily, but at least the people I call friends have a drive to produce things and feel validation and satisfaction from that: in the west that validation is usually money and recognition from peers and large groups of strangers.
But yeah, I guess many people dont want to work because their options for work suck. It is not that many of those their contribution is not basically 0 or negative now as it is and with robots/ai coming in the coming 50 years, I rather have them living a human life with social housing, free playstations and basic income instead of slaving away at something useless just because of some weird idea that any work is better than no work to spend their short life on.
> Quite the opposite. I basically retired at 40. A few of my coworkers did the same.
You do get that's anecdotal, right?
And that a basic income will mean you don't die from starvation, but won't give you the kind of comfortable lifestyle that you and a few of your ex-coworkers presumably scored from some happenstance in your employment arc, right?
And that there's lots of research about how 'most people' do not in fact stop working, at least within the confines of the trials done, right?
> I basically retired at 40.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess your monthly spending exceeds $10-20k and is probably well north of $100k.
People usually voluntarily retire when they have the resources to maintain their lifestyle. Basic income wouldn’t be nearly as much as a pension, so that wouldn’t really apply. And taking a pension means you have to quit, whereas a basic income pays you even if you keep working. The comparison really doesn’t seem to work.
Pascal's scam! Oh no, what if the world explodes! We can't risk it!
If you asked me what I would spend a 'free' 10k on at 15, 25 or 35 I would have given you radically different answers. I don't expect what someone does with basic income at 65 to have much relation to what they would do at other stages in life.
15: GTS 8800 25: GTX 1080 35: RTX 8090
I suspect when I'm 45, $10,000 won't get nvidias flagship card, so I'll let you know about that one when I get there
> We already have something that resembles a basic income in developed countries. It's called retirement pensions.
These aren’t comparable at all. UBI programs would start at adulthood and not require any work. Someone receiving a retirement pension has put in many years of work.
> And what we see there is that most people, as soon as they are eligible for their pension, they stop working.
oh well that's cuz they're retired.
Except…people retire so they can stop working? Or they retire because they can no longer physically or mentally work.
False equivalence. People stop working during retirement because it is the very cultural expectation to not work.
There is no reason to believe this analogy you're attempting to make would transfer to something like a negative tax rate
Maybe they can stop working because of cultural allowance.
Who knows how many people should retire at 30 if the social norms allowed it.
Think about it this way. If a 60 year old says “I’m retiring” most responses will be “aw good for you, you earned it”. But if a 23 year old says “I am retiring” I guarantee there will be many more negative responses and questions.
The system that is killing our planet, that exploits and ends up killing the majority of its unwilling participants? Yeah, I don't think the loss in productivity will be a bad thing. Maybe people will consider the effect of their work before doing it a little more when they don't have a gun to their head.
Well yeah it's the exact same thing except... given to people when they're 67, i.e. after a lifetime of working and about 10 years from the mean age of death.
Gee why would they stop working, you think?
> And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained?
Technology gives us massive gains in productivity; we could reasonably reduce working hours to <20/week in the developed world. We might have less business dynamic analysts or scrum masters or social media coordinators. We'll be fine.
> Technology gives us massive gains in productivity; we could reasonably reduce working hours to <20/week in the developed world. We might have less business dynamic analysts or scrum masters or social media coordinators. We'll be fine.
> beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
Unfortunately the governments and the wealthy looked at Hayek and decided they much preferred the idea where they could continue to abuse the workers.
> Well yeah it's the exact same thing except... given to people when they're 67
Have you met any people who were eligible for a pension at e.g. 50? I know a few, they all retired. Not because they couldn't continue to work, but because with the pension they were finally able to quit.
"We might have less business dynamic analysts or scrum masters or social media coordinators."
Do we have any guarantees of this? Couldn't we equally have way less Nurses, Doctors, ER Techs, Construction Workers building homes, Teachers.
Feels like all the stressful, back-breaking jobs will be quitting first?
> Do we have any guarantees of this? Couldn't we equally have way less Nurses, Doctors, ER Techs, Construction Workers building homes, Teachers.
No, because we actually need those things, so we would keep hiring people to do them, whereas useless makework jobs are the obvious thing to cut if there is less labor available.
Or it could give those people a reasonable bargaining position for their labor and they will be able to demand better wages or hours which would attract more people into those industries.
Nurses deserve more money than we can give them but their salaries are around $100K and Hospital Margins are 5%. So yea, UBI-style, the government pretty much just has to print the money to hand to the nurses to get them more money.
I'm not a fan of basic income due to its inflationary effect that all-but neutralizes its spending power.
I also think that the monetary system is inherently imperfect. To put it mildly.
It is structurally unfixable and there is no possible utopia within it. Last, there is no other good option that I know of.
But pensions are not Basic Income, thank goodness. They're a payment into an investment fund that grows as lifetime earned income grows. They're an asset, exactly the same as a business is an asset.
In fact, pension funds invest in businesses.
Whether or not that fund is well managed is another discussion. Moreover, most people in the United States (at least) do not get pensions aside from a minimal social security payment. Which was also paid into a fund.
Working is only individually valuable when there are good jobs, or to fend off starvation.
What working is not is an immutable positive value that any de facto sweat shop owner can claim to offer the opportunity for.
At a certain point the social contract is broken and working becomes something, at the least, that is not virtuous to offer nor to fulfill. Except insofar as one's personal survival needs are concerned.
When there are only terrible jobs, then society should not feel morally compelled to work them. Especially when it has other income. And especially when a concurrent social value is to drop wages and benefits through the floor, by any means necessary.
For the sake of virtue, are business owners working underpaid second jobs "for the system"?
Are successful business owners widely coming out of retirement to work "for the sake of the system"?
We're not talking about volunteering at the old age home. We're talking about a real work schedule.
Society may have to work those jobs out of necessity, but they can and should tell people trying to morally shame them with a "come out of retirement and to work attitude" to go copulate with themselves.
Especially when the social contract between employers and employees is long-shattered beyond repair.
In society, there can be low paying jobs alongside well paying jobs. What there can't be is moralizing combined with decades of illegal shenanigans whose sole purpose is to suppress wages / job security (especially due to wages) and undermine working conditions.
"Productivity". Give us a break.
Unless your payment is compelling enough to get me to work, as a retired person the health of your business is not my morality nor my productivity. Your business is yours, and mine is my own.
Are those business owners going to come and "be productive" by cleaning my gutters after work? Are they going to "be productive" by doing my taxes?
>And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained?
That may be the most communist mindset I've ever seen written out on this forum.
Being a WalMart floor employee is not a virtuous contribution to the system, above being retired. It's an agreement, for a certain wage, to be a part of the employee pool of the Walton family's for-profit vehicle.
Would it be virtuous to come out of retirement and work that job if it paid nothing?
Should the Walton's pay every red cent of their profit to employees, make nothing themselves, and run their business regardless and for the sake of the system?
The virtue is one's monetary needs, and the Walton's have to pay enough to meet the social contract requirement to maintain enough employees in their employee pool. If they don't have enough employees, then they aren't meeting the unspoken requirement. No amount of moralizing / whining is going to increase their social virtue. Only cash on-offer will.
Joe's construction or accounting business is not "the system" either. It's Joe's income vehicle. Retired people have their own income vehicles.
If the employer-employee relationship is a social contract, and not slavery, then working is no more "for the system" then making a profit is.
And if both are needed to "sustain the system", and the business owner can't draw enough people to work via a pay package, then the answer is to bring them in as partners.
If both are for the benefit of the system, and one person is going to be morally compelled to work, and another is going to be morally compelled to make a profit, and the pay isn't high enough to compel the employee, then they need to be made a profit partner in the business.
When I hear someone whining that they are worried about having enough workforce, I think that they are exhausting their vocabulary to avoid stating that they're too cheap to pay employees enough for the job.
I'm not saying that they have to be compelled to pay a minimum wage. Offer $1 an hour for all I would care. As long as the other side of that isn't to illegally / immorally undermine the labor pool.
But the other side of that is if they aren't paying enough to draw employees, then the "I'm going to employ people" part of their business is not viable.
The other side of it is not "people are too over-benefitted / over-privileged to work".
If you want someone to join a social contract, then you have to make a compelling enough offer. That's our only "system".
Anything else needs to be a partnership / significant enough profit split.
When the pay is rock-bottom, employees are scarce, and those profit shares are eventually legally compelled because "oh no, the system", then it's formal communism.
When the employees are legally compelled without partnerships, then its slavery.
> I'm not a fan of basic income due to its inflationary effect that all-but neutralizes its spending power.
What causes you to believe that a transfer payment would be inflationary? Some high-paid partner at a law firm has less money, some low-paid teacher has more money, net amount of money everybody has in total hasn't changed.
// most people as soon as they are eligible...stop working...//
Is that true?
I mean, the best comparison to this wouldn't be some kind of pension system. It would be the universal guaranteed income we already have. Yes, we guarantee every citizen a minimum income...as long as they are over 65 :-)
Most of them would probably keep working in some capacity if they didn't lose their benefits.
