UBI of Nearly $2,000 a Month To Be Trialed In England - Slashdot
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UBI of Nearly $2,000 a Month To Be Trialed In England
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The trial is two years in the making. Dialogue with local communities during that time found strong support for UBI and informed how the trial was planned. It focuses on two areas in the U.K., one in East Finchley in the capital of London, which is often associated with a higher cost of living, and one in central Jarrow in the northeast of the country. Local citizens would be able to put themselves forward to take part in the trial and participant selection would be random. Autonomy has said they would work to ensure the trial group is representative, however.
"All the evidence shows that it would directly alleviate poverty and boost millions of people's wellbeing," said Will Stronge, director of research at Autonomy. Stronge believes changes to the world we live in could also be a key driver in the adoption of UBI. "With the decades ahead set to be full of economic shocks due to climate change and new forms of automation, basic income is going to be a crucial part of securing livelihoods in the future," he said. A UBI could even impact the way people feel about work, some research suggests. In 2022, 19% of Americans said it would ease their frustrations with their jobs.
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A complete waste of the money. Who are the complete incompetent failures who keep dreaming these meaningless giveaway programs up?
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People with way to much money apparently (Or they're good at convincing suckers to give them way to much money)
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If you look at the figures involved (take a look at the PDF, its very flashy), it looks like its a 2-year jobs program for the researchers.
The total budget for the study is £1.6million GBP - of that, £1.1million is earmarked for the actual study, the cost of researchers, admin and other internal costs take up about £500,000.
Both the control group and the recipient group are essentially self-selected, as the people involved have to apply to the scheme and be chosen for one or the other of t
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Given the hassle involved in a UC claim (for claimant and DWP both) this could actually save a little money. There was similar talk concerning the state pension: right now if you don't qualify for the full state pension* you can claim a top-up credit to bring it up to the full amount. Some bright spark finally realised that if everyone ends up with the same amount anyway why not ditch the pension credit scheme along with all the attendant admin work and just pay everyone the same to begin with?
* e.g. if yo
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You probably have never heard of a thing called "Science". It works by doing "experiments". This is one such experiment.
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The rich people who funded the campaign of lies to get Brexit though certainly don't intend to give away their money.
This is just a study. Although why there have been quite so many studies into UBI I don't know. Probably because having a far greater number of people than jobs is a real possibility in the near future.
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30 people is nothing like "Universal" basic income. Call a giveaway a what it is. I don't believe in UBI, it is a farse. Experiments around what happens when you give *everyone* money have nothing to do with experiments in giving *30* people money. UBI is just inflation on steroids, the money has to come from somewhere on an on-going basis.
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UBI funding has never been proposed by printing money, devaluing the currency and leading to inflation, so I don't know where you get that idea.
The more basic reason UBI will never happen is it gives low income workers far more bargaining power without joining a union. The plutocracy will never allow this
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If we had true universal UBi where do you believe that money comes from?
There are a few options:
1) print it = more inflation
2) raise taxes = taking from working people and giving it to non-productive people
3) reduce government services = never win another election and in effect raise taxes because the same taxes yields fewer servicesEconomics at this level is very well understood. You can't add zillions of dollars/pound/euros/whatever to the economy without other severe negative effects. If it was that easy and didn't have such serious negatives then we'd have already been doing it.
Regarding the plutocracy and bargaining power. Who is the plutocracy? Can you name a few people who are members of this cabal that are actively opposing UBI? And who will the poor+UBi be bargaining with? What new power will UBI provide them after inflation kicks in (because no way in Hell are services being reduced and a tax increase like that would also result in election losses so printing is the only option).
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The most sensible plan I heard was to replace the massive, complex, and almost entirely arbitrary benefit system with UBI. That benefit system is a huge employer of permanent staff and expensive external contractors. It sounds a fortune on offices, bespoke software, and other costs. It appears to be grossly inefficient as well as open to abuse.
Getting rid of that probably won't fund UBI, but it sure will make it a lot cheaper and will probably distribute more funds to those that need them and less to those
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I'll admit to being a unicorn - a libertarian who supports a UBI.
But there are some differences:
1. $500, not $2k, a month. Maybe the UK equivalent would be £1,000, but probably closer the £700. For the USA, this is around poverty for a family of 4.
2. I'd be clearing out all the other welfare benefits, as part of that.
3. Clearing out the non medical welfare and flattening the tax brackets can fund it. You just pay ~30% from dollar 1. Just remember that you're ahead $6k from the start, equiv
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To be fair, we should at least listen to the arguments of the proponents:
* If it's universal, you can fire everyone in social security tasked with assessing and policing your income levels.
* You can discontinue a bunch of specialised welfare services, because people can use the UBI to obtain those services themselves.
* All the people with no money were going to get welfare anyway.
* All the people working might have taxes raised... but they'll also get free money which balances it out.
Does that mean I think
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You conveniently left out an option 2b, raise taxes but only on the mega-wealthy, people receiving several million per year. You also left out another option, 2c, close tax loopholes that allow the mega-rich to dodge taxes that they really should be paying already. You claim to be "way smarter" than everybody, but really you're just another moron pushing conservative ideology.
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In fairness "non-productive" is probably the likely outcome. I know people who "retired" on benefits less than that amount because they figured out how to maximise their handouts and minimise their expenses. Give everyone enough money for a basic standard of living and expect LOTS of people to leave the workforce. And I doubt many of them will be using their time to start a business or volunteer given experience with local demographics who are essentially already in this situation. The implication is not that low income workers are non-productive, it's that they'll become truly non-productive when the gun of impending poverty and homelessness is no longer aimed at their head, forcing them to toil for their position on the next-to-bottom-rung.
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I disagree.
If a non-means-tested UBI of £1,600 was enacted, I would fully expect more people to enter the workforce - a lot of the current benefits system in the UK is based around means testing, so if you earn above a certain amount in a month then your benefits are decreased appropriately. There are plenty of people out there who either avoid employment or are underemployed precisely because they risk losing their current benefits and thus are worse off - a guaranteed benefit that isnt means tested
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People deciding to live on benefits is a very emotive issue, but it's tiny compared to the real problems.
We have millions with long term health problems, many severe enough to prevent them working. The pandemic created at least a million more.
Landlordism is out of control too, with property prices at insane levels and the social contract well and truly broken. With bexit on top, the future is bleak for many Brits.
None of it can be fixed either. Best case, Labour get in at the next election, and in 4-5 years
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Gave out free loans to shit banks for the last decade. Now everything has inflated valuations, there is another huge tulip splurge (AI > Crypto) and while they have "skipped" a rate increase there will definitely be more to follow because real inflation is still out of control.
They are actively working for a recession at this point because putting fuck tons of people out of work kills demand and inflation - with a lot of pain for people who in no way benefited from their policies.
Meanwhile gangsters in
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it's such, such simple math.
Available country budge = 100%
Government expenses for all services = 90%
Additional ubi service = 20%
Required budget = 110%.
Available = 100%
Over budget 10%.
How do you fill that 10%? You either take from other programs, raise more taxes, or print money. Two of those options definitely raise inflation IE everything gets more expensive. The first option takes away from other people in need of services.-
Fire lots of job for life lazy government staff who spend most of their days avoiding work by shredding benefit applications or supporting paperwork. That definitely happens in the UK, I know people that saw it first hand. Also external contractors milk the system with huge bills but the government can't get rid of them because they are there only ones that do any work.
Replace that mess with UBI and you have made massive savings. Not saying that will pay for all of UBI though.
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to shredding the UBI paperwork.
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That would be things like tax returns, birth records, and such. Not a lot of manpower required, could be mostly automated, so not nearly as much work as properly verifying that people don't make too much money or have too many assets, are following various rules like living in qualified housing, etc...
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"The more basic reason UBI will never happen is it gives low income workers far more bargaining power"
More fundamental than that is that it is simply economically unviable. Just do the math. Suppose every American is provided just $1000 per month. 330 million people x $1000/mo x 12 mo/yr = approx $4 quadrillion. That's 4,000 Trillion. Not even considering administrative cost. Just benefits paid out. And 'just' $1000/mo.
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This sounds like a uniquely American problem. Much of the rest of the world already provides low income workers with power through all manner of government protections. It's why the unions outside of the states are far less relevant.
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Were lost to automation not outsourcing or inflation. This is just the automation that's happened since the 1970s. You can find a business insider article on Google that discusses attend the study that backs it up. And this is before all the llms and AI start to rip in the jobs.
So if you're going to sit there and ask me where the fuck the money is going to come from my answer is decades and decades and decades of automation. We weren't supposed to have to keep working harder and harder to compete for an -
It is called an "experiment", no matter how much you may dislike it and deride it. There are people that actually want data on things and are not satisfied with some nebulous "belief" because "belief" does not solve problems.
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It is not called a UBI experiment by anyone with at least half of a brain to work with, because it is not universal. By definition you are not testing UBI by giving it to 30 people. You are just testing BI. You will learn how it will work for them in a world where it's not universal, but you will learn nothing about how it will affect the larger economy. But it's also a fuckoff waste of time because this has already been studied a lot, and everyone is just wasting someone else's money replicating worthless
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Depends on the experiment. You have not defined what it is you're looking to achieve or the bounds. Are you trying to see how society economically reacts to UBI? Then you'd be right. Are you trying to see how the test group react to the change in their financial position, then you'd be wrong.
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Yes, we see all those UBI "experiments", which fail at least one or more parts in either being universal, basic, or income...
Some come with selection criteria like income limits, or race/ethnicity. That cancels out being universal. In theory everyone, including Bill Gates should receive it.
Others are just too low to handle "basic" needs. Can't pay for shelter and food? Nope does not meet the criteria.
And none of them are reliable income, they are just temporary handouts. It won't replace need for a job, may
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they have NHS as well so they don't need to pay USA pricing for an doctor.
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NHS is free, right?
All those doctors and hospitals and nurses and such are paid with what?
Government has only 2 sources of cash: taxes and printing.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
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by Unscanned ( 10378134 ) on Monday June 05, 2023 @06:56PM (#63578721)
So many things wrong with this. First, by the "u" in "UBI," do they mean universal, as in everyone, or just a handful of people? I don't think "universal" means what they think it means. Second, it's a giant waste of money. Just find 30 people whose avergae income is the equivalent of what they were going to give away, and ask THEM how their lives are going, then find 30 random completely broke people, (I'm sure they have at least that many,) and ask THEM the SAME QUESTIONS. The differences in their lives will be the same as the differences between the lives of those they actually will ask. Better still, give me ALL that money, and I'll tell them whatever they want to hear, and the results will be just as valid and useful as what they'll get from the people they're actually going to squander this money on. The results will be just as useful, and far less time-consuming and expensive than giving away all that money and then having to pay people to ask all these people about their "experiences".
"Mr. Jones, how much has your life improved since we gave you that $60,000?" they can ask me.
"About $60,000," I'll reply.
In order for this study to be even remotely useful, they have to give it... to... EVERYBODY. This test will be like trying to learn about the intoxicating effect of alcohol by rubbing a drop of it on the bottom of someone's SHOE.-
In order for this study to be even remotely useful, they have to give it... to... EVERYBODY
The closest real test of UBI was all the free cash sloshed out during Covid. And the result? Record inflation. That's exactly what'll you'll see if they ever try UBI on a large scale. On a small scale - the "participants" are just "winning" one of those $500/week for life scratch tickets.
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Your statement assumes that's all that happened. Inflation was caused by many things, including our largest demographic cohort, the Baby Boomers, reaching retirement age and a lot of them saying "fuck it, I don't REALLY need to work and die from COVID, I guess I'll retire a few years early."...as well as a MASSIVE supply chain crunch. Also, immigration laws were actually enforced! Your local restaurants had to charge more because they couldn't staff up with illegal immigrants. Then it was capped off by
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Nope. The cause of inflation is never attributed to any single thing. Inflation was not due to cash given out by COVID. It didn't help, but rather inflation was the summary of all economic and social conditions during COVID, which is why there are countries who *didn't* give out any "free cash" and yet had far worse inflation than in the USA, and countries who did who none the less had far better inflation figures.
Anything you think happened due to X in 2021/2022 is wrong. COVID messed with every single fuc
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In the UK almost all of the money went to businesses, not individuals.
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Except that tax money from the wealthy wouldn't have been out chasing goods... It would have been in the market.
When you hand it out to the poor, it will be quickly spent on goods/rent/whatever. The rich having money doesn't cause inflation, it's spending by the masses that causes inflation.
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There are multiple [investopedia.com] causes of inflation. Economically speaking, nothing is ever simple.
The most direct result of an economy where there is too much money held by the wealthy and too little held by everyone else is: crime. And lots of it. That in turn results in an explosion of prisons packed full of poor people who were driven to crime. Who pays to keep all those prisoners alive?
The taxpayer.
One way or another, the cost of supporting the lower class will be borne by the taxpayer. The prisons are an opti
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Inflation itself is only created in one place: The Central Bank.
Money you have / All the money in the economy
Is the same as:
Goods and Services you may acquire / All goods and services in the economy
If you increase money without increasing goods and services, you bump up inflation, regardless of where that money resides. Where the inflation really kicks in depends on who is acquiring the dollars. If it's in the rich, high art, yachts, hypercars, etc will cost more. If its to college kids, iPhones a
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Most of our products are not priced lower due to reducing purchasing power...for most, it's the reverse. If more people bought iPhones, Apple could charge less, theoretically. Real estate is impacted by it, but minimally compared to the wealthy buying properties and leaving them unoccupied as investment properties. Fuel is impacted a little bit, but nothing compared to supply disruptions. Services with limited capacity, like education, are...but not in a huge manner. I would argue giving money to the w
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Spending doesn't cause inflation either, a supply and demand economic imbalance does, and even then it's only one of many factors contributing. Which is why there are countries with very few poor people who don't have inflation, and countries with a large portion of poor who do, just as there are examples to the contrary.
If you select any single thing as a cause of inflation you are wrong. Inflation is a highly complex multi-variable problem.
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If life was fairly decent in the "poor" bracket, family bbqs, spending time with the kids, just hanging out with friends and I can give up working 60 hours a week to make ends meet, someone else can go be these productive, I'd rather spend more time with family on ubi, I'm fine with driving a beater car etc.
In fact, the only reason I bother with anything nicer is to try and offset the boatload of work I do in some way. Sign me up, you go work hard, I'll have a higher quality of life with the extra time and
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I don't even care about the flaws in the universality of it. We just don't live in a post-scarcity society yet. There is no point to the study, not because it's not universal, but because it can't be universal. We don't have the automation in place to support giving this to everyone. And I'm not going to be the sucker who works and is taxed into oblivion so other people don't have to.
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Just find 30 people whose avergae income is the equivalent of what they were going to give away, and ask THEM how their lives are going, then find 30 random completely broke people, (I'm sure they have at least that many,) and ask THEM the SAME QUESTIONS. The differences in their lives will be the same as the differences between the lives of those they actually will ask.
No, I think the outcome of this study will be much more positive, for invalid reasons:
1) Additional money is appreciated for a while a
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Consider that participants know it's going to end in 2 years. Will they say to themselves, "I have 2 years to afford tuition to this program and maybe get a better job at the end, that can perpetuate the $2K / mo thru my own efforts?
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The pdf has a generic line in the summary section that basically says they want money from rich donors and government. I didn't dig further in. The general tone of the pdf was very unicorn fart tra la la but ymmv.
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That's a coincidence. I want rich donors too for my study into the effects of beer and chocolate.
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With only 30 people there, won't be much effect. Make it fully universal and watch inflation soar like a rocket.
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At length.
There are many future fictional societies in which everyone is guaranteed a minimal level of wealth on which to live.
They just don't call it "universal basic income." They call it "on the dole."
It's a common feature of dystopian futures, in which the unwashed masses are either reduced to utter dependency (i.e., slavery) on the largess of their masters, or kept drugged senseless so they don't burn the world to the ground in protest.
I don't recall a single story in which it isn't presented as a causative feature of the dystopia - a tool without which the ruling class cannot remain the ruling class. (Though I'm sure there are some recent ones in which is it - literally - the salvation of civilization, but I don't read childish trash fantasy.)
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Nope. You are intentionally confusing two very different things. An UBI does not stop when you work. And studies consistently show >80% would continue to work.
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IMHO there was a narrow window of opportunity for implementing UBI which has effectively closed with the intro of usable machine intelligence (MI...yeah I'm being dork about AI v. MI). The window was already narrowing as a result of demographic trends resulting in fewer (younger) workers supporting a larger (older) retiree class. But with MI stealing a bunch of decent waged backoffice, customer service, and other work, that ratio of employed to not is worse.
The funding of UBI has always seemed to me to in
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Yeah the "narrow window of opportunity" happened around 1917 with the Communist Revolution. We see how well that worked out!
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London has been used as a treasure chest for years by Russian oligarchs, largely in the form of luxury properties in London's weathiest districts.
Liquidate those bastards to help pay for UBI for years to come. Get your Robin Hood on England!
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Replace "years" with "centuries" and replace "russian oligarchs" with "ultra-wealthy and corrupt people worldwide" and you're right on the money.
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Not a long-term one. Apparently many people here do not get that. It does depend, in part, on the inability of many people to plan ahead for a longer time and so it will show some effects.
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I'm going to have to agree with their assessment that this will directly improve participants' QOL. I'm not entirely sure why UBI needs testing, as it's the way to go for evening the playing field of life for everyone, especially those with disabilities who have to depend on shitty benefits because people don't understand nonvisible disabilities. That's my ha'penny's worth, anyway. Interested to see how the study plays out.
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to have a middle class lifestyle without needing to do any pesky work.
The problem is, somebody is still needed to clean the toilets.
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Here is an interesting thought: Does the existence of someone paid to clean toilets justify leaving toilets dirty?
In most peoples' minds, the existence of these low-paying labor job like janitor and garbage collector is something obvious. As if society and civilization IMPLIES that there are people who dont clean up after themselves, and people who will be paid to do it. And the people paid to do it being at the bottom of the totem pole.
But let's say, hypothetically, that UBI happens, and that everyone woul -
Yes, people are needed to clean the toilets. But yet the people who are needed to clean the toilets don't deserve the recompense required to live a happy life, own a small home, start a family? If they were actually paid that recompense, there would be no need for UBI in the first place.
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Why do reported always "translate" the amount of money without also posting the amount in the original currency? It happens here frequently too where we get stuff reported in Euro without the original currency amount being mentioned.
Anyway, they are receiving £1,600/mo
(which makes more sense than an arbitrary "1983")
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In case you're wondering why they picked Jarrow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] The researchers' attempt at being poetic?
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BTW, the UK already has a welfare system. The problem is that those in power have decided that they want to make being unemployed or underemployed as unlivable & degrading as possible.
The causes of poverty include extreme wealth inequality so an effective solution requires eliminating those tax cuts & tax havens for the rich & having guaranteed living wages to eliminate the garish phenomenon of "the working poor," i.e. working full time or more & still living in poverty.
Decreasing pove
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They got a report, that fixing waste-water alone would cost £600 billions over 5 decades.
They also have the worst state-pension and sick-pay of all the OECD countries.There's no money, it won't happen for more than 30 people.
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Hey we'd all like free money, yeah?
Well this is doomed on several levels:
1) wealth correlates highly with iq. People who are poor tend to be in self inflicted spirals of extremely poor decision making, compounded by the stress and anxiety of being poor. Handing them a pile of cash might remove that later anxiety, but won't improve their decision making shortcomings that put them there in the first place.2) even if they're otherwise average, there are abundant examples (Cf the lottery, Las Vegas, etc) of p
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It will work fine for the 30 person test group - Their life will be way better with an extra 24k/year. Now, if you give it to everyone - like UBI is supposed to? Thats when the inflation kicks in, and rent will be 2k/month more for everyone.
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Especially since the people in the control sample may have read these news reports and now know that they are not getting the money and hence are likely angry and probably motivated to report far worse outcomes of not being paid.
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UBI trials are invalid for one simple reason: with true UBI (the Universal part) you are enriching a small group at the detriment of their peers. They become richer than otherwise as compared to their peer group, inflationary pressure will be negligible.
It angers me to realize that the politicians, researchers, and proponents of such a complex economic system slept through 8th grade economics and don't understand such a basic principle as scarcity.
Retry this experiment but give everyone the same amount, and you will see what happens. Inflationary pressure will reveal itself, and everything will just cost more. It sucks no one seems to understand what money is. The amount of money you have, divided by the amount of money in the entire system, tells you how much of the goods and services in the economy you get to consume vs how much there is entirely. Money is just a middleware. You cant eat it. If everyone else has X more money, then everything will just cost what they cost today + the X amount more for basic requirements. We will not suddenly have more of everything because there are more dollars to pay for it. We wont suddenly have more doctors. In fact, you will likely have less as a grater portion of the population drop out of the workforce and shrink that total amount of goods and services in the economy, meaning your proportion will also shrink.-
I figured the idea is not to generate MORE money, but to redistribute the wealth temporarily for theoretical GDP gains later. In short, give everyone £2k/month for "free" and pay for it via. high taxes. Careful balancing act that, you need to tax people's additional income from working enough to pay for UBI but not so much they give up and just live off UBI. The security of knowing that you'll always have that £2k/mo. no matter what means you get to take more risks and don't find yourself in the poverty trap where you can't risk losing your dead-end job income to chase a dream that might never come true. By enabling more entrepreneurs to take risks you generate more economic opportunities for your country's GDP to gain from. And in theory the handful of success stories make up for the expectedly higher number of people who decide not contributing to society is just fine and dandy.
But there's so many uncontrollable factors in that that I can't really see it as a good idea. The government gave us money in various guises to cope with the pandemic, food and fuel bills, general cost of living rises and the economy at large is taking it back 10-fold because that's how this shit works.
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This!
If they tax the rich and redistribute the wealth (as they should), there will be some inflation, but nowhere near the apocalyptic levels everyone is crying about.
There is a huge split between the classes right now which leads to huge social pressure building up. UBI is a way to let off that pressure in a somewhat controlled way. The alternative is to change nothing and see what will happen then... and we know from history what's likely to happen..
That is only a part of the problem though. Another problem is housing prices in a lot of places. Housings are used as investment vehicles which is super exploitative thing to do, and has led to absurdly high prices. This needs to stop. Teachers, police, fire fighters and hundreds of other professionals need to be able to afford a decent housing on their salary in the cities. How to do that - very simple. Step 1 - announce a significant property tax discount for peoples permanent/main residence like 90-100%. Most people will like that. Alongside that announcement or on the next year, announce 10% (or more) increase on property taxes, noting that the effect for primary residences will be negligible because of the discount. The next year another bump and the year after that as well and so on. People will gradually start to offload extra housing as it becomes expensive to hold on to it. This way you won't shock the market as well.
Another step can be requiring citizenship or permanent resident status in order to buy residential property. This will cut off/slow down a lot of illegal money.
This is the only thing that will work - anyone who proposes to "just build more houses" or some financing schemes/aids to help people buy their home is talking bullshit.-
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The rich are not that heavily taxed. If we define rich as the top 1%, they have had two massive tax cuts in the past 25 years (Bush and Trump tax cuts) which are saving them hundreds of billions of dollars per year in taxes. This represents real savings from what they were already paying before the tax cuts, so if they weren't able to avoid the taxes before there is little reason to believe they could avoid them if they were repealed.
And until property other than housing is taxed, any claims the rich are he
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This is the UK, not the US. It is a different world.
People with little or no income receive "benefits" through an amazingly complicated network of rules that is mostly incomprehensible, and as a result, so I was told, it costs GBP30 in bureaucracy for each GBP1 paid in benefits, if any one person is earning significant money.
Consequently, on the face of it, a system based on "just give them the f'ing money, damn it!" would likely be massively cheaper
The present system has the highly undesirable side eff
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It's not going to be inflationary, provided it is funded. Provided the overall money in the economy is roughly the same, no inflation. Presumably somebody will be taxed to pay for it, they will spend less money, thus it all balances out.
Having said that, there could be some effects, because the people getting free money will spend it differently than the people it was taxed from, but this is the least of our worries with a UBI scheme.
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It is going to be inflationary even if it is funded. You have an island and that has a billionaire and 100 poor people. The billionaire pays the poor people to make sandwiches. So, they grow wheat, mill bread, grow produce, raise cattle, and viola you have sandwiches. The billionaire buys some and the poor people buy some. Now tax the billionaire and give everyone money. Suddenly you do not need to bake bread to buy a sandwich. You expect the number of sandwiches to increase? You are all out of your dumbass
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Everyone can eat healthier and exercise more with their newfound wealth and free time. You won't need as many doctors
Now that you don't have to works 2 jobs and put yourself through medical school at the same time. More people will train to be doctors and they will focus on learning, not what they will eat tonight.
More doctors, better doctors and less need for doctors. Finally cut those waiting lists.
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Inflation would only kick in if government paid for it by printing money - or issuing bonds and having the central bank rig the bond price.
If they pay for it with taxation, there wouldnâ(TM)t really be a problem. Yes demand and prices would go up in some areas, but it would go down in others and the jobs and services would shift as they do for any economic change.
The real problem with ubi tests is that everyone knows the money will run out - so they never work, which is what you would expect under a real ubi.
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Not if you're willing to trim at the top. Fundamentally the mistake you're making is that you're assuming that some people just have to be poor and miserable in order for some people to be comfortable. That's not true. We have had the capacity to give everyone decent food, shelter, transportation education and healthcare since the 1970s.
The problem we have is one of distribution not of resources. Before anyone gets a crack at anything in this economy we give 50 to 60% to the top 1%. They hide that wealth in shell companies and offshore accounts and tax Havens. That's well that's just deleted from the economy.
Ubi, real ubi, has been repeatedly shown to not reduce people's desire to work or to drastically increase inflation. All it really does is get us back to the wages the baby boomers enjoyed in their prime. My mom in 1985 was a nurse and made $50 an hour adjusted for inflation. She had a high school diploma. My kid's 4-year stem degree and now going on 3 years of experience got them about $35 an hour. They're currently desperately saving every penny they can get in a desperate bid to go to grad school because it costs 2K a month just to have a place to live and they're not even in that nice an area.
The problem we're having is that we have had decades of automation devouring jobs without realizing it or talking about it because everyone was focused on outsourcing and offshoring. You can find a Business insider article explaining that 70% of middle class jobs were lost to outsourcing since 1980. It's on Google and you can easily find it.
Ubi coupled with programs to ensure that housing and food are guaranteed and a Medicare for all healthcare system is how we restore the deal the boomers got when they pulled the ladder up behind them. And we're either going to do that or gen Z is going to get violent.
I'm an old man but I'm pretty sure most of slashdot is Gen x. You guys are going to be alive for all this. If you don't want a generalissimo handing your kids and grandkids rifles to crack your skull open you should probably start thinking about how you're going to take the largesse from all that automation and spread it about. There's plenty of it so inflation is only a problem if you keep letting the people at the top take 50 60% of everything before anyone else gets a piece.
And if you don't we're going to be a brutal dictatorship in about 10 years. When Russia and China did that they had massive food shortages and widespread violence for no other reason but they put lunatics in charge of desperation. And that's where we're heading we keep up this pace-
I think Iain Banks summed it up best:
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State of the Art made me blush and cry, although I do think that Maye Musk is the real-life Diziet Sma
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I'm just curious to know which country/state had UBI for all their citizens. Or , I guess countries/states, since you used the word 'repeatedly', implying that this has happened more than once. Because you know what the 'U' in 'UBI' stands for, right?
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As a landowner/property manager, I can confidently say that it doesn't work that way. Tenants freely share when they get a raise, and that NEVER prompts me to increase the rent. Instead, it gives me hope that the rent will come in on time and in full. And that is usually what it means. If you don't like the idea of UBI, that's fine. But increasing rent is the weakest possible argument.
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Rent is just used as an example. The truth is that inflation will hit across the entire spectrum of goods and services. It's basic economics of supply and demand. Increase the money supply and people will demand more for their goods and services. Just because you happen to be altruistic doesn't mean the rest of the population is.
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The UK has already been running UBI for a select group of 650 people for decades, now. They get £7,215 a month or £86,584 a year.
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Sure. If you so it stupid. That is one of the reason for such experiments, to find parameters that work.
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The whole premise of UBI is that if it were truly "Universal" you could shutdown countless government departments, services, and welfare systems if you do this.
Of course the reality of this isn't just lost on commenters, it's lost on the people who implement this as well so they won't actually produce the efficiency gains fundamental to making UBI actually financially work. That and this is the UK, not having a large scale bureaucracy is UnBritish.
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That's not obvious at all. You may as well pick any other essential item. Say transportation, food, or communication, and say it must rise massively. Demand for housing won't rise much with UBI and supply will not fall. You have nothing backing up your claim but that it's truthy and lets you claim welfare is inherently evil for reasons.
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* Almost every non-homeowner cites economic limitations [statista.com] as the reason they haven't purchased a homne
* Mortgage subsidies increase home ownership and increase housing prices [federalreserve.gov]So yes does seem like money will go towards housing and result in increased housing prices.
You're saying people are going to expend their extra $24,000/year entirely on Snicker's Bars and cell phone contracts?
While you can indeed expect all of those prices to rise as after the COVID stimulus [visualcapitalist.com], you can also expect that extra money will lar [pgpf.org]
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On the other hand, with UBI there will be less pressure to find housing close to jobs, so UBI receivers have a much wider choice of residences.
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Apparently you didn't do Econ 1, week 1, because that "free money" won't be freshly minted, it will be taxed from someone who won't be able to spend it anymore, thus overall money is constant. So the money is the same, and the services in the economy is the same, so nothing changes.
Having said that, things *could* change.. the people with the free money could spend it differently, and the people it was taxed from might be resentful and stop working. However this is not Econ 1, week 1, this is Econ doctorate
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Question: Who gets hurt by inflation?
Answer: almost everyone
You are hurt by inflation if you are in any of the following categories:
Poor
Middle class
Upper class
Fixed income
Pension
Have 401k
Eat food
Pay rent
Buy gasoline
Buy car
Own a business
Work for a business
Provide services
Buy services
Buy anything at allWho is not hurt?
BankersBankers just pass along the costs to borrowers with higher interest loans.
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Not sure how you missed it, but we just had a couple banks collapse because of the inflation prompted interest rate hikes. We also saw a some banks get bought out to avoid collapsing. The bankers are dealing with this worse than anyone else.
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Unless of course, you live in a demand-driven economy (yes darling, we do) and the increase in spending results in more jobs to manufacture housing, which in turn, results in more hiring and heats up the economy, just like FDR pulled the US out of the Great Depression [eh.net]
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What happens when poor people get money is that they spend it. That's what being poor means. They were either not taught or somehow failed to learn the important nuance that differentiates money and wealth. So you would see poor neighborhoods with nicer clothes, newer cars, bigger home electronics, fresher furnishings, etc. Only because the one area where they do produce wealth - career earnings - will be diluted, upward mobility will be reduced and the wealth will more efficiently flow up to the elite.
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Another thing you'd see is the working poor paying off bills and getting some deferred maintenance done. Not all of the poor are that improvident, although a majority of them probably are.
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Fair point, though I was going to complain N is too small. This is way too small to be statististically significant, and won't capture all the possible types of people. You need rich people, middle class people, lower class people, educated people, uneducated, men, women, people with children, people without children... and you need all combinations of those categories and you need them in sufficient numbers to be statistically significant. You need thousands of people for it to mean anything.
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Not too many people are in a rush to replace their 200K lifestyle with a 24K lifestyle... I don't think... But who knows. Bear in mind that taxes will rise to fund it, so if you're making a lot from those investments, the extra tax may well be equal to 24K, and you may actually not be better off. In fact that would probably be the aim, that your average middling person will pay as much in extra tax as the UBI they are given so that most people's situation is no net change. It must be so for the math to work
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You may have missed that "the rich" could all already retire. Most do not because they want to work.
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"Nobody would work" has been debunked a long time ago. The thing is > 80% would continue to work at current levels and most of the rest would still do some work. But a lot of people suspect many others would stop working. Greed, envy, stupidity is what keeps the "nobody would work" argument alive, no matter how bogus it is. As to "life would lose meaning", that is exactly the reason why most people would continue to work to some degree.
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As >80% would still want to work, this is really a minor point and not the big question many people mistakenly believe it is.
The concrete mechanisms depend on the specific country and its conditions. Here is an example with some numbers for Germany and Switzerland:
https://www.intereconomics.eu/... [intereconomics.eu]If you do a bit of research, you will find more information. The bottom line is that at least for the first world, the claims this cannot be financed are entirely bogus and merely underline the anxieties of the
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