Universal basic income: German experiment bring surprising results

&quot;No strings attached...for threee years&quot;<p>That study has shown exactly nothing. Of course I&#x27;m not going to quit if I&#x27;m out of job and UBI after three years.

This seems to be a common thread in articles about UBI experiments: Economists, critics, and others expect the behavior of the recipients to be determined by either (1) &quot;economic rationalist&quot; clockwork, or (2) some laughably simplistic (and very demeaning) stereotype of poor people.<p>And the results generally bear little resemblance to either (1) or (2).<p>Napoleon supposedly said &quot;the moral is to the physical as three to one&quot; in reference to the battlefield performance of military units. But the same is true across extremely wide ranges of human behaviors.

surprisingly people do love to work.<p>Although I have a masters degree I worked for 10 years, 3 nights each week, as a volunteer psychotherapist, providing free therapy to those that could least afford psychotherapy, those that needed it most.<p>I obviously had a day job too. I loved working for free, the benefits are huge, less stress and autonomy in how you choose to spend your time and skills and a greater sense of achievement.<p>If I had CBI I would work for free.<p>I am all for social devotional work backed with CBI.<p>CBI and work for free if you want to.<p>I can definitetely understand the sense of feeling more mentally stable without the daily stresses that come with not enough money to live on.<p>Most people who earn a decent salary are generally against CBI because of their own values around their own working ethic. There is nothing written anywhere that says that work is beneficial to a human being.<p>The money for nothing crowd always raises its ugly head when talking about any support that benefits human development especially of the poor.<p>As a retired therapist the majority of my lower socio-economic clients problems where due in full to the finanacial situation they found themselves in.<p>All therapists carry a sense of helplessnes when dealing with such clients becaue we cannot help them.

&gt;A German experiment has found that people are likely to continue working full-time even if they receive no-strings-attached universal basic income payments.<p>Surprising only to those who have not read literally any other study on UBI. They all come to this conclusion.<p>The only reason we don&#x27;t have nice things like this: universal housing, healthcare, income, food security, is because a handful of dragons sit on and hoard unfathomably sized mountains of gold and convince the uneducated and those ignorant of economics and politics that the real problem is average people getting what they deserve - A dignified life where their basic needs are met and they have the dignified freedom to pursue a fulfilling life rather than spend it enriching aforementioned dragons for exploitative wages.

&gt;&gt; A German experiment has found that people are likely to continue working full-time even if they receive no-strings-attached universal basic income payments.<p>That&#x27;s because this is not basic income but just an additional, lucky source of income, for a limited time. It&#x27;s effectively landing a contract job on top of a regular job. I&#x27;m gonna go to great lengths to keep both since I can save the additional money and they might have quite an impact on my life.<p>I&#x27;m guessing the target people were not the best paid workers in Germany but still, saving €1200 per month is a lot more than the average of €450 (&quot;According to a survey conducted in 2020 in Germany, the average monthly savings among the population amounted to 451 euros.&quot;). So if they were an average family that had a job and saved €450, with the &quot;UBI&quot; they just managet to triple their savings over a period of three years! Of course people won&#x27;t quit their jobs, they&#x27;re not stupid.<p>Overall it shows absolutely nothing on UBI but maybe it shows something on human psychology and rational behavior.

I&#x27;ve been thinking about UBI a bit.<p>One effect it might have, is that employers need to go above and beyond to keep their workers happy. So, so many people have a job which they at the very best tolerate, but would quit on the spot - if they had the economic means to do so.<p>Some of those jobs are quite critical for society. Just think about healthcare...plenty of people enter healthcare with high morale and a desire to help, but find them completely disillusioned due to overwork, shitty shifts, unappreciation, mediocre pay, and what have you. If half of healthcare workers quit on the spot, that would lead to a societal crisis. But maybe it would also force the employers to fundamentally change the space, in order to not lose their employees.<p>I also think UBI would give people a &quot;second chance&quot;. Lots of people enter the workforce before they know what they want to do, and find themselves lock into the profession or work - due to financial reasons.

All this simulations and experiments always have the same problem: They simulate giving people free money, but you are not simulating the other side of the coin: extracting the money from other people to pay for it(a.k.a stealing or &quot;redistributing&quot; euphemis)<p>The &quot;surprising results&quot; are so surprising to me because I talk to people in Germany and most people believe they pay too much taxes, specially young people. The difference is that middle class Germans are actually paying for the system. No free lunch there.<p>If robots take over human labor, you can always own robots(privately owning distributed means of production) instead of having a central planning system that never worked but interested people are hell bent designing so they benefit.

Any proper experiment for UBI requires 1) to do it for a whole economy. You can&#x27;t have 10 or 100 people on UBI where the job market, prices etc aren&#x27;t affected by UBI. And 2) For life. The small effects on behavior if I&#x27;m given UBI for 1, 3 or 5 years are going to be so small as to be uninteresting. The surprising results will just be artifacts of the experiment.

In the US at least, UBI would basically mean the rent and monthly mortgage prices increase by the same amount as the monthly UBI.

&gt;Mein Grundeinkommen (My Basic Income), the Berlin-based non-profit that ran the German study, followed 122 people for three years. From June 2021 to May 2024, this group received an unconditional sum of €1,200 ($1,365) per month.<p>122 people for 3 years seems worse than useless, worse in that it probably makes people think this isn&#x27;t statistically useless.

&gt;Matthew Johnson, a professor of public policy at Northumbria University in the U.K., who works on basic income and authored a book on the topic, called the findings “unsurprising.”<p>Seems like the article undermines its own headline.

None of this matters because the premise, that is to hand €1,200 per month to people &quot;for free&quot;, is totally unrealistic and unsustainable at scale.

“We find no evidence that people love doing nothing,”<p>Come talk to me