This is very misleading reporting. First: All studies so far show a pretty consistent ~10% work disincentive. This is what all the detractors say when they say it disincentivizes work. So how about this one? From actually reading the study's conclusion:<p>> Slightly less than one-fifth were employed before but unemployed during the pilot (17%)<p>So even worse than what we've seen so far. 17% dropping out of the labor market when its a short-term study is huge.<p>For the ~10% figure, Chris Stucchio has a fairly succinct roundup of the work disincentive of other studies so far: <a href="https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2019/basic_income_reduces_employment.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2019/basic_income_reduces...</a><p>~~~<p>Personal opinion: If you consider multi-generational entrenchments of poverty as its own problem, worth serious merit, then the work disincentive could be a disaster. In UBI long run, the children of parents who have <i>never</i> worked are probably going to be at a large disadvantage. I think its already a problem <i>today</i> for children of SSI recipient parents (even compared to children of SSDI parents), but its not easy to prove.
The issue I see with basic income is that most money is spent on housing and health care. These two things are supply constrained so it's more of an auction for who can afford them.<p>With basic income, we may just raise the cost of those things.<p>This problem wouldn't appear in a study that distributed to only some individuals.<p>We need to solve the regulatory or otherwise organizational problems of these things to provide real relief. Throwing money at the problem will just move money to a few hands.
From my personal point of view, basic income SHOULD disincentivise work; it's a boost for society, health, well-being, children, etc.<p>Because in the current economy, a lot of people have to work unreasonable hours, multiple jobs, and have all people in a family work to make ends meet, at the cost of personal health and well-being, personal time, having children at all or having more children, getting married and buying a house, etc.<p>Right now I'm stressed because I'm earning less than I spend, my girlfriend is stressed because she doesn't have a job yet and due to personal reasons may find it hard to get, keep, and work enough hours at a job, etc. If she earned a basic income we'd be out of the woods already. If I then also earned one on top of my job we'd be VERY comfortable.<p>(And keep in mind I would already pay for both of our basic incomes through the income taxes I'm paying at the moment. I'm happily paying taxes because other people paying taxes put me through college and into my current job)
> The three-year, $150-million program<p>Three year. Would you quit your job, and move somewhere cheaper if you knew the money will run out after three years, and you'll have a three year gap in your CV?<p>Are there really no lottery winners winning lifetime monthly payouts to study?<p>Because, if you gave me 5x average earnings for three years, I wouldn't quit my job. But if you guaranteed the money for the rest of my life, i'd pursue different activities (fun, good for me, but non-productive for society).
I want UBI and a 30-32 hour work week, so I guess I’m proposing a 20% “disincentivization”.<p>Would fewer people in the workforce really be so bad? What’s the carbon and water footprint of all of these goods we really don’t need but we bust our humps for anyway? At this point, more robots don’t mean more of the stuff we need. they mean more stuff we <i>don't</i> need.
I don't think this fits the definition of basic income.<p>> Whatever income participants earned was deducted from their basic income at 50 per cent<p>That is equivalent to a massive 50% tax rate on every dollar earned. It seems to me the whole point of UBI is that its universal and not conditional on how much you earn otherwise.
> The project worked by recruiting low-income people and couples, offering them a fixed payment with no strings attached that worked out to approximately $17,000 for individuals and $24,000 for couples.<p>Why discriminate so heavily against couples?<p>It creates every incentive to lie about your relationship status. Or to avoid sharing a household altogether, creating greater economic inefficiencies and less built in social support of having a partner.
My issue, and I only have one, with these pilot projects for basic income is that its not realistic. The people in the project know that it will end at a fixed time, so their actions are different compared to what would happen in a BI/UBI system.
There is a lot of misunderstanding in this thread, and a lot of strong opinions.<p>"UBI" is mentioned repeatedly, but this wasn't a UBI program.<p>The intention of the program was looking to replace our existing welfare and many Ontario works programs.<p>Instead, the incoming government (after campaigning on completing the pilot) canceled the program unilaterally, and is looking to outsource our welfare payment programs to foreign companies.<p>Please read a summary on the program:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Basic_Income_Pilot_Project" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Basic_Income_Pilot_Pro...</a>
The basic income experiment improved motivation to find a higher paying job for both employed and unemployed members but<p>> almost three-quarters of the respondents who were employed six months before receiving basic income were still working while receiving basic income. Nearly 80 percent of the respondents who were previously unemployed remained without work during the pilot. About 20 percent found employment.<p>So the majority of unemployed people stayed unemployed. Of the people employed prior to the pilot, about 23% became unemployed although in some cases it may have been to pursue more education.<p>> The unemployed group were three times more likely to report their general health had declined during the pilot as compared to the employed group.<p>The majority of the unemployed group reported improved general health but a significant portion of the unemployed group became worse off during the pilot.<p>The majority of participants did report improved well-being through a survey. The survey asked questions about general health, mental health, and financial well-being among others.<p>If the cost was $150,000,000 for 4,000 people for 3 years, the cost per year should be approx $50,000,000.<p>The articles states there are 2,000,000 people in poverty in the Ontario province so this program, if scaled up to all those in poverty, would be expected to cost $25,000,000,000 per year from simply scaling up the cost 500x.
These studies feel like "free energy machines" that totally work as long as they are plugged into a wall socket, that is: as long as the budget doesn't come from the system itself, you're not testing under anything close to real world conditions.<p>Otherwise, the results aren't surprising to me. I know very few people that wouldn't keep/be working if they had a UBI (and the ones that wouldn't aren't really working now), but I also know very few people that would keep their current job. UBI, if sustained and sustainable, should work similar to a roaring economy with full employment in that regard: if you want somebody to work in the sewers or garbage collection, you'll have to pay them well.
I really, really like the idea of UBI. However, some napkin math:<p>In the US, with ~250 million people being eligible, a $1000 UBI would cost ~$3 trillion. That's almost the entire budget of the US. How is this even remotely realistic right now? Even if you can cut other spending in half due to it, you'd need an additional $1.5 trillion in "income" essentially. Is that something that would even be possible? How many rich people are there to tax?
> The ... program was scrapped by Ontario's ... government in July. ... minister Lisa MacLeod, said the decision was made because the program was failing to help people become "independent contributors to the economy."<p>Basic income is supposed to help people cover their basic needs, not to make them "independent contributors to the economy".<p>This is doubly the case when we remember that doing volunteer work, social/community organizing, (non-commercialized) art - is not even counted as part of "the economy".<p>Also, if you're an employee - becoming an employee or continuing to be one - you're not an "independent contributor to the economy". But the vast majority of"contributors to the economy" are wage workers, not independent tradespeople.
"nearly three-quarters of respondents who were working when the pilot project began kept at it despite receiving basic income."
So can we infer that 25% of those working chose to actually quit full time? I think it's safe to say this much reduction in labor availability is not the result the government was hoping for.
The state is right, maybe not to call it off prematurely but if these figures would have been the same after the trial the conclusion would have been: they need to look for another policy. A good 'normal' social security policy would result in 0 people quitting and a lot of people getting employed. That's the kind of result the government should want to see before even considering a change.
I wish the report broke out the family health benefits based on if the participant gained/lost work did/didn't go to school. (edit: Also provide a category for those that were too ill to work to begin with.) From the conclusion:<p>>As for the labour market participation of survey respondents, over half indicated working before and during the pilot (54%) while less than a quarter were unemployed before and during the pilot (24%). Slightly less than one-fifth were employed before but unemployed during the pilot (17%) and a smaller number reported not working before but finding work during the pilot (5%). Just under half of those who stopped working during the pilot returned to school to improve their future employability (40.6%).<p>>Those who were working both before and during the pilot reported improvements in their rate of pay (37%), working conditions (31%) and job security (27%). The entire survey sample reported other work-related improvements such as searching more easily for a job (61%),staying motivated to find better employment (79%) and starting school or an educational training program (26%).<p><a href="https://labourstudies.mcmaster.ca/documents/southern-ontarios-basic-income-experience.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://labourstudies.mcmaster.ca/documents/southern-ontario...</a>
I'm not optimistic about basic income for the average person.<p>That said, I know that if I had basic income, I would spend my time building things for the world. There are lots of side projects that I have worked on or want to work on, but simply haven't been able to get them off the ground because I don't have the time to dedicate enough mental energy. There's too much at stake for me to compromise my current job to work on something that may or may not succeed. I could work on projects after hours or during the weekend, but I've found this to be too spiritually exhausting and simply impractical; I have a hard time maintaining momentum if I can't dedicate more than half my time to something.<p>If I could get by with the basics and not have to be employed, I could actually get something done that not only might help the world but employ others.
As others have said this study doesn't have enough data to be conclusive. So most people, including me, comment based on which of the following we believe in:<p>1. People are inherently lazy. UBI will encourage them to do less.
2. People are inherently interested in maximizing their potential. UBI will enable them to do more.<p>I couldn't find any social science research on which of the above is more true. But if we could tell maybe that can help us guess at how many UBI recipients will abuse the system as that seems to be the main concern around UBI.
Couldn't you consider older people living on Social Security to be somewhat of a UBI microclimate? I'd imagine you could learn a lot by sending the same questionnaire to them. A lot of the mental factors are the same: desire vs. ability to work, the changes in routine pre and post income, etc.<p>Also, I wonder if we had UBI there would be facilities that would take care of you if you turned over your income check to them in the same way that some nursing homes do. One wonders how different this would be than a minimum security prison....
Basic income makes sense to me as a more effective implementation of welfare, but I personally strongly prefer the negative income tax implementation: <a href="https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/negative-income-tax-explained" rel="nofollow">https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/negative-incom...</a><p>That seems to address many of the concerns that people are raising in this thread. Namely, it doesn’t require you to work, but ensures that you never have a disincentive to work either.
The problem is not the productivity of those on UBI, the elephant in the room is the ideology of humans on this planet who are forced into labor for survival vs those who are percieved as having a free ride.<p>That schism will exist for any set of parameters and methods of rolling it out. It will not solve class imbalances, it will make them painfully clear.<p>E.G. for those of us who have wealth, own houses, etc, UBI will make having a job seem like an optional folly to a person with debt and rent to pay. We really don't want a society like that.
The problem I have with all of these studies is that they only look at the receiving side of the equation. In other words, their experiment is not a closed system where their subjects have to also provide the free money to each other, which is what UBI proposes.<p>The results therefor are completely uninteresting -- do people's quality of life go up when you just give them free money, no strings attached? I would certainly expect so! I don't think this is news to anybody. But what about the people paying for the UBI? If their taxes have to go up 3%.. 5%.. 10%.. whatever it is, then any respectable study of the affects of UBI has to at the very least take into account the negative affects on the paying population, if there are any. Otherwise, the conclusions we draw are probably going to be disastrously wrong.<p>An other way of thinking about it is with a thought experiment. If scientists didn't consider the full affects of their experiments on the entire system as a whole, then they could easily show that entropy decreases over time, or that momentum or energy or mass are not conserved.<p>So, I'd like to see a study where participants are divided into payers and recipients. Perhaps, 90% are payers and 10% are recipients, and we track not only the benefits in lifestyle that the receiving 10% enjoy, but also look for any drops in quality of life suffered by the 90%.
People actually enjoy being useful. We actually enjoy work which preserves dignity and has visible benefit.<p>This idea that people only do work because they must is flawed. Most citizens are happy when they are doing a reasonable amount of work.<p>Basic Income is crucial because not all useful work is fairly paid. From parenting to housekeeping, (early) innovating to art - so many beneficial activities suffer because the stress of financial security grinds them out of existence.
None of these empirical studies are useful for broad policy decisions. This is a bit like linear regression, there are to many dimensions each matters differently and the same classifier will not hold true if you add more dimensions randomly or remove few.<p>There is no "core human trend" to all this that will get revealed only by empirical studies but not by logic. (Empirical studies are useful to judge say whether vaping actually makes us more healthy on average. Smoking is so irrational at some level that no amount of logic can help us predict how people behave.)<p>The economics logic is pretty clear. People will react to incentives. But there is no hard formula that we can apply. Raising minimum wage by few cents will not cause job loss but increasing it by few dollars will. But if you make minimum wage around $100 then whole industry might go underground and no effective jobless but for in government record keeping.<p>I think effectiveness of UBI will be useful only if we perform far too many experience under far too variable circumstances and then understand the broader trends.
People interested in this UBI should look at the Canada Child Benefit (CCB).<p>It has been described in many ways, but it is essentially a basic income for children (or the parents of children).<p>It is means tested, which allows for the program to be really generous to low income single parents with young children.<p>The effect has been a dramatic reduction in poverty -- especially child poverty-- in a couple of years. This is an example of a modest government intervention that will have massive positive impacts in the lives of these families.<p>More info:
<a href="https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/trudeau-s-child-benefit-is-helping-drive-poverty-to-new-lows-1.1220332" rel="nofollow">https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/trudeau-s-child-benefit-is-helpi...</a><p>CCB Calculator:
<a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/child-family-benefits/child-family-benefits-calculator.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/child-famil...</a>
I’m glad there are experiments like this actually happening for any amount of time. It would be great to see the experiment run it’s full course, but it’s maybe more surprising to me that it got funded, rather than that it got cancelled. Thinking about how contentious and political funding can be for things we know we need, like schools, it’s not very surprising that something expensive and not 100% required ends up on the chopping block.<p>What do you think it would realistically take to be able to fund UBI (or other experiments) without running the risk of being cancelled? How could it be set up so that next year’s political opponent doesn’t have the ability to axe a project to make themselves look good?
If you raise the bar by $x across the board then doesn't $x gradually becomes the new bottom? If we give everyone $50k / year tax-free, would that just make $50k the new $0 relative to cost of living? The effect being the same as a progressive tax (those who make far more are far less impacted).<p>If it is basically the same as a progressive tax, then it does strike me as a much simpler way to implement it (instead of complicated varying brackets). However adding it on top of an existing progressive tax scheme is adding another point of complexity right?<p>Maybe replacing progressive taxes with a flat tax and then adding UBI would be a better / simpler approach.
I think it's important to study the details of different implementations before making any conclusions, positive or negative, about basic income. Yeah, one of the challenges with a test like this is knowing there's a finite end date.<p>Another aspect that is often ignored in these discussions is the question of whether recipients continue to be eligible for basic social safety net type of services. I've heard the libertarian approach to basic income is essentially a replacement for the services we consider "welfare", and that's what we're seeing out of the proposal in California where recipients receiving other assistance would be ineligible for this kind of income. Medicaid, for one, is a strike against eligibility.<p>I haven't looked into Ontario's test in detail, but I doubt the recipients gave up their single-payer healthcare to receive basic income. Also makes me think that BI is only so popular because we rarely dive into the details of what happens to existing social programs, a question that will surely turn the UI/BI discussion more divisive.
One argument I never see in UBI discussions is that some people are just bad with money. If you give more money to someone who doesn't budget, save, live within their means, etc, it won't help. There are people who spend beyond their means and then get payday loans. So while it would help some people who would spend wisely, many would not.<p>You would have payday loans 2.0 where people would borrow against future UBI payments, spend on non necessities, and then be in an probably worse situation compared to the people still receiving UBI.
I think a good iterative solution is to keep pay the same but change all laws to pivot around a 32-hour work week instead of 40. This will force employers to hire more people or pay more over time for any work past 32 hours. I think UBI is an extreme solution to the problems that globalization and automation presents. It's better to spread the existing labor. After a certain point we could move down to 24 hour work week finally down to a UBI model when no labor is required.
I'd be interested to see what would happen in the tech world if there was a UBI. How many more startups would there be if people could survive on a UBI.... it's essentially like having an unlimited runway to get startups off the ground. Not the "we are going to disrupt entire industries and make billions" type of startups most likely, but still, worthy startups creating chunks of software for smaller markets that take longer to monetize
Everyone is talking about "receiving money with no-strings attached" however there is a huge string attached, and everyone knows it very well, especially the researchers, and that is the experiment will end.<p>This means that the experiment is temporary whereas real UBI would be permanent. A temporary experiment where everyone is aware that it will end cannot simulate the same changes that a permanent experiment would do. But I guess that wouldn't be an experiement anymore.
Very promising to read this. Feels like many more studies needed and more data to be collected in order to figure out what is indeed effective and what's not.<p>Just like the early hype with microfinance decades ago - there was an initial hype cycle, then broader cynicism in the academic community, and ultimately, a data-driven informed understanding of what in fact works (on a more nuanced level - by country, income levels, program design, etc.)
Totally off-topic so totally relevant: this is the kind of topic for which I wish each comment had its author's age, location and income displayed.
2 thoughts:
* Only ~200 people out of 1000 completed the survey. Many of these people were found by the researchers, so there's likely bias (given the nature of the report)
* Basic income's benefits will eventually go away in a society with easy access to credit. Similar to comments by throwaway13337.
Shouldn't it be obvious that the people receiving money would become healthier and happier? The question is whether they become healthier and happier enough to offset the cost of making them that way. Are they the best use of that tax money? What's the lifetime return on investment?
If you want to make UBI a reality, instead of just talking about it for 50 years, we have to do it from the bottom up.<p>I supported Yang, my company Qbix even built <a href="https://yang2020.app" rel="nofollow">https://yang2020.app</a> for him. But he didn’t get anywhere.<p>We have a project to build UBI from the bottom up, using cryptocurrencies for communities - including local townships and cities like Stockton. Local currencies already exist, including casino chips, disney dollars, berkshares, bristol pounds etc. This just puts them on a blockchain (actually, a new architecture we designed that’s far faster than blockchain).<p>If you are really interested, or want to get involved in some way to make it a reality, I suggest to do the following:<p>1. Visit <a href="https://intercoin.org/feature/ubi" rel="nofollow">https://intercoin.org/feature/ubi</a> and fill out the form<p>2. Visit <a href="https://community.intercoin.org" rel="nofollow">https://community.intercoin.org</a> and participate<p>Or if you are a Javascript developer, contact me. My email is “greg” at that domain, intercoin.org
Like the brilliant social engineer Jacque Fresco said, we should just give everyone what they need to live for free in what he called a Resource Based Economy. That is even better than giving them money. I highly recommend his book "The best that money can't buy".
I'm not sure anything was proven about people continuing to work during a temporary basic income study. If the basic income provided is temporary as part of a study, why would I leave my job when I know I'm going to need the income from my job after the study is over?
Why is there a focus on people working at all? I thought one of the reasons UBI was so interesting is that people who are stupid, lazy, incompetent or just too obnoxious to work in customer service can stay at home and out of my way.
More than universal basic income, I would love to also see universal basic services. A guarantee of some sort that the basic income will cover a bundle of basic things such as housing, transport, food, healthcare, utilities.
Well I for one voted for Andrew Yang. #CouldhavehadYang.
Still, we need more of these pilots, but unfortunately pilots limited in geography, time, and universality cannot capture the knock on effects of a universal UBI.
This misses the point entirely. UBI is the democratic socialist version of The Great Leap Forward. Its an attempt to better human existence via direct government intervention, something which rarely works as intended (assuming you're counting net gains). I'm pretty pragmatic, (and libertarian) so if we're going to start down this path let's skip the faux capitalism and get straight to the bread and games part. The government <i>already</i> has a near limitless amount of power to effect changes in the economic structure of the country, and this is where they've gotten us. Going further down that path seems a bit daft.<p>I realize part of this problem is that we've moved into being a post-frontier world, where there are few, if any, places left where people can go to govern themselves, but I don't see why the lack of empty unclaimed space should lead to the government taking money from some citizens to buy the loyalty of other citizens.
The end does not justify the means. Forcibly removing someone's money and transferring it to another person can never be justified. Tax-funded UBI is theft, slavery, and extortion.<p>However, if a billionaire wishes to privately sponsor UBI, this is a completely different story in charity and example that should be regarded. It's important to differentiate between the two, but unfortunately most UBI schemes refer to extortion, not charity.
So most people 'kept working' but 25% quit, I think that kind of validates that a lot of people will quit, which is the concern. 25% is a lot. It'd be interesting to see numbers from those who were not employed, i.e. how many gained employment.<p>The bits about 'having to drop future plans' isn't fair. Of course, people will have to adjust after losing a major source of income.
>The report shows nearly three-quarters of respondents who were working when the pilot project began kept at it despite receiving basic income.<p>In other words, over 25% of them stopped working. This is a pretty big contradiction to the title.
No one seems to address the idea that coercion is necessary to force people to pay for this, something i do not wish to do, and many people feel the same. It has already been shown this disincentives work, Those of us that do work and are taxed to pay for the already massively wasteful welfare state resent being enslaved even further to pay for the errors of socialist re-distributive schemes.