Universal basic income of nearly $2000/mo to be trialed in UK for the first time

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/05/universal-basic-income-could-be-coming-to-england-for-the-first-time.html

by gslin • 3 years ago

48 85 3 years ago

codedokode4• 3 years ago

This whole idea is stupid. How about giving proper financial support for parents and covering all expenses for raising a child and not just give away money to lazy people who don't want to work and contribute nothing to society.

zeusk• 3 years ago

This whole idea is stupid. How about giving proper financial support for unfortunate and beaten down people and covering all expenses for sustaining life and not just give away money to lazy parents who don't want to work and contribute nothing to society.

codedokode4• 3 years ago

Parents contribute to society by providing future workers and soldiers.

surgical_fire8• 3 years ago

Well, this is a nice change of pace of governments giving money and "get out of jail free cards" to their cronies that belong to the rich elites, who quite often are damaging to society, instead of simply "not contributing".

sublinear3• 3 years ago

Who says these 30 recipients aren't politically connected?

cheeseomlit5• 3 years ago

Its just a cynical power play as usual. "Vote for me and I'll give you money" is a platform as old as politics

grey_earthling2• 3 years ago

This whole idea is stupid. How about giving proper financial support for parents and covering all expenses for raising a child

— like a universal basic income —

and not just give away money to lazy people who don't want to work and contribute nothing to society.

— like “investors' dividends”.

This argument makes more sense against capitalism than against this.

codedokode4• 3 years ago

As the amount of money is limited it is important to set priorities.

If you have extra money to give away then it is better to give them to parents to promote creating families, to pay for education for children from poor families, to improve free medicine, to create new jobs etc. It doesn't make sense to give money to people who are just lazy and got used to spending their parents' money instead of working. They will just spend money on alcohol, cigarettes or online games.

bubbleRefuge• 3 years ago

The Job Guarantee proposal is much better [1]. At its essence is to guarantee a federally funded job to anyone that wants one with a living wage and full benefits. This would tighten the labor market, put a floor on it, and lift society from the ground up. Firms would then have to provide better jobs than the guarantee if they want labor.

1. https://gimms.org.uk/job-guarantee/

fwungy3• 3 years ago

Exactly. Government preferences should be given to people raising children, regardless of race, sexuality, or gender. Much of the social services network is about supporting children. If parents were given job preference over other identity categories it would be a) fair and b) protect children without creating social service costs.

welshwelsh2• 3 years ago

Subsiding parenthood is far worse than subsidizing laziness.

The opposite would be better: give financial support to people only if they agree not to waste that money on kids they can't afford to have.

codedokode4• 3 years ago

Then almost anyone except software developers and riches won't be able to have kids, and 20-30 years later there will be nobody to serve in the army and protect your country. Great plan.

skymast• 3 years ago

Next years headlines "Why did food prices skyrocket?"

Socialism never works, not even this time. Not even next time.

kgwxd2• 3 years ago

Capitalism didn't work either. Maybe we should try a little of both at the same time.

rndmize• 3 years ago

Do you mean last year's headlines? Or this years?

surgical_fire8• 3 years ago

Socialism works fine for the rich in capitalist countries. The government is always quick to bail them out with everybody's money whenever something doesn't go their way. Remember that funky business of SVB some time ago?

I didn't even mention the number of loopholes and tax exemptions they get.

Maybe extending those benefits to lower castes of society would be a good idea.

bcrosby95• 3 years ago

I'm curious why you think food prices will rise. Governments already fight hunger in various ways, so I assume you don't believe some people have to starve for food to be affordable to the rest of us.

I assume it's from the angle of: whose going to work to farm/sell the food if they get UBI?

Or was yours just a sarcastic knee-jerk response?

ehvatum• 3 years ago

I'm curious why you think food prices will rise

More money (provided by UBI) chasing fewer resources (less reason to work) until a new equilibrium is reached.

Somebody has to farm, and it’s not easy work.

xivzgrev• 3 years ago

Assume for a moment all farmers continue to work.

Sellers are incentivized to charge as much as the market will bear.

Suppose you have a market of 1 person and he has $10 to spend on pork per month. You as the pork producer will charge $10 for a months supply of pork (if you can profit). Suppose that is how things go.

Now you learn your customer has $20 to spend on pork thanks to an increase in government benefits. The customer is feeling much better about himself. But Whoopee, you can suddenly charge $20!!

The customer now has a dilemma: either give you his increase, or go without pork. He choose to continue buying pork. He is no better off, it just enriches you the seller.

Now this is not perfect - it’s quite possible some new pork farmer may enter the market and charge $15. But more money tends to just shift price points up.

What actually lowers real prices is shifts in supply (offshoring, crop yield technologies, etc).

Consider an even simpler example, your own spending. If you suddenly gained $2k per month more, that’d be great! You could save, or buy something nice etc. but your consumption will largely remain the same - you still need housing, food, transit, etc. what if those suppliers just happen to increase prices at the same time? Are you really going to change your patterns? Probably not especially if it’s all suppliers, like we saw with covid. Everything got more expensive but everyone kept buying because they still need what they need. And if there was suddenly an increase in government benefits, you can safely bet most suppliers would raise prices as much as they can.

unclenoriega• 3 years ago

I'm curious why you describe UBI as socialism. I wouldn't think transfer payments would have that deep of an effect on the underlying economic system. Are you suggesting that without fear of starvation the workers will rise up and seize the means of production?

fswd• 3 years ago

Correct.

Similarly, Food prices have dramatically gone down since they cut out the extra COVID foodstamps in my state. It's not the only reason, but I know people with like $2000 in foodstamps that don't know what to do with it

grey_earthling2• 3 years ago

The U.S. economy and welfare state are quite dissimilar to the UK.

nly2• 3 years ago

Yeah! Because the amount of food you eat is only limited by how much money you have, right?

kgwxd2• 3 years ago

I don't get how you can trial UBI and get much out of it. Being universal is the key concept. If everyone had it, the entire economy would change direction. Do they do these just to say "look, we tried, and it didn't work"?

dpflan• 3 years ago

Are you saying because everyone gets it, it's a wash? Isn't it more about how the money moves around the economy? Others are pointing out the small sample size, which makes this seem pretty insignificant to impact the economy, and more about the people's experience and change in living/living quality.

lotsofpulp• 3 years ago

The whole point of UBI is that it is universal, and therefore causes those at the very bottom to immediately renegotiate their pay to quality of life ratio. Without this action on a mass scale, it cannot flow up the chain to properly adjust the supply and demand curves to fulfill the goals of UBI.

nwah1• 3 years ago

Whether that is what GP was saying or not, I don't know. But everyone receiving a basic income guarantee, with no other economic changes, would mean that the amount that landlords and other rent-seekers could expect to charge would dramatically increase, and almost all of the benefits would go to those who hold all the bargaining power by controlling the essentials of life.

Money isn't wealth. Bargaining power is wealth. Adding more magic numbers in a broad-based way doesn't change the bargaining power. The main change is that funds would be diverted from productive enterprises to rent-seeking ones.

PM_me_your_math3• 3 years ago

Because the concept itself is a lie and panderous ploy for voters. If UBI was universal, nobody would work and UBI would have no funding source since government can only ever be funded by tax revenue by people who work.

surgical_fire8• 3 years ago

If UBI was universal, nobody would work

[citation needed]

alistairSH• 3 years ago

Alaska already has UBI, yet people continue to work in Alaska.

mrfinn• 3 years ago

nobody would work in a miserable job for a miserable wage

FTFY

Sohcahtoa823• 3 years ago

If UBI was universal, nobody would work

If you take a literal definition of "nobody", this is 100% wrong.

UBI should only give you a bare minimum. Cheap food. Cheap housing. Cheap clothes. The bare essentials, with very little discretionary income.

There are a lot of people where this is all they want. They have no ambitions. No life goals. These people would take UBI and not work.

But most people want more. They want better food. Better housing. More entertainment options. Funds to fuel a hobby. Money to travel. These people will still work. And they'll be happier about it, knowing that they don't have to work.

Minimum wage jobs are filled with people that can't get anything better and are just taking what they can get. You could swap them out with people that are there because they want to be.

welshwelsh2• 3 years ago

Middle class people already have the equivalent of UBI from their families. Not only do they still work, they are more productive and pay more taxes than people without that support.

My parents provided me with free housing and food for over 20 years with no strings attached. They never told me to get a job or to help pay the bills. While my less fortunate peers wasted their lives working at McDonald's, I had the privilege of being able to study and experiment with different careers without needing to worry about food and shelter.

Behind every highly productive worker is hundreds of thousands of dollars of FREE support that they did not work for or earn in any way.

The only problem is that how much support you get depends on what family you happen to be born into. When the government provides that support instead, it means everyone gets equal opportunity and it doesn't matter what family you come from.

BXlnt2EachOther• 3 years ago

Having it time-limited, here two years, is another challenge that gets brought up when trialing UBI. It's more of a temporary bonus than something participants can depend on.

(not making a point one way or another for UBI itself)

sublinear3• 3 years ago

Thirty people in the U.K. could soon receive £1,600 ($1,983) each month if the trial by independent think tank Autonomy secures funding. The basic income payments are estimated to cost £1.15 million through the duration of the two-year project.

This is much cheaper than other political tactics and obviously these are cherry picked recipients. This is awful.

samvher• 3 years ago

Care to expand on your thinking here? In what way do you think these recipients would be cherry picked, and what do you think would be the political goals?

sublinear3• 3 years ago

This is the political equivalent of paid Amazon reviews. The goal is to be the winning despot for a socialist regime. It's like the lottery, but for power. They're never going to stop these "trials" until anti-bribery laws are updated to include false philanthropy.

cheeseomlit5• 3 years ago

If you're running a study like this and want to ensure a certain result to support your take on the issue it'd be easy to pick recipients to reinforce whatever your goals are. IE. only choose people with stable employment who won't all quit their jobs immediately when they start getting checks, or the opposite if your goal is to sink UBI.

throw__away73912• 3 years ago

Here's how all these experiments should work: first participants volunteer, then everyone who volunteers will pay a special tax to pay benefits for the duration of the program.

Taking outside money and funneling into a closed system is guaranteed to produce distorted results, likely to be made worse because anyone running such an experiment is extremely likely to have a strong pre-existing pro-UBI bias that makes the result even more of a foregone conclusion.

b800h• 3 years ago

"Thirty people in the U.K. could soon receive £1,600 ($1,983) each month if the trial by independent think tank Autonomy secures funding."

Yeah, I'm running one of these too, and I'll give people £5k each month if I receive funding. How is this news?

candiddevmike• 3 years ago

If I get 5 people to fund you, can I get 5k a month? Perhaps we could design a tiered system based on how many people are brought in to fund your think tank, possibly in the shape of a triangle.

pelagicAustral• 3 years ago

I want in on this.

Our_Benefactors• 3 years ago

It’s not news, it’s journalism.

senko3• 3 years ago

Any serious UBI study would look at entire population of a town/county/region, not thirty people. This is beyond useless.

0xbadc0de54• 3 years ago

But it was studied many times across large populations. USSR, Cambodia, North Korea, Venezuela, Hungary, Somalia, etc, etc... They didn't use the same euphemism, but they did take it seriously and to its logical conclusion.

senko3• 3 years ago

As someone who's lived in a communist country, no, that had nothing to do with UBI.

The related communist motto is "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs"[0]. Basically, you have to work to the best of your ability, and what you'll get is whatever someone on top decides you need. You don't need to go further than that to realize that idea is bonkers.

The idea of UBI is universal basic income with no strings attached. It does not preclude having other income, nor does it require any work to be performed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi...

hysan• 3 years ago

I see every small UBI study as a move to make the idea of UBI more acceptable rather than a study to prove the effectiveness of UBI. In my opinion, these kinds of small steps are needed because gaining political momentum is the hardest thing to achieve when money is involved.

rootusrootus• 3 years ago

30 people, for 2 years? Just as meaningless as every other time someone has done this. It would need to be for more than 30 people, and funded indefinitely. People are not going to make life changes based on a mere 2 years of guaranteed income.

Sohcahtoa823• 3 years ago

Something that just crossed my mind...

I've always been a proponent of a decent minimum wage, because I've argued that eliminating minimum wage would result in a race to the bottom on wages as people become more desperate for work, and the standard of living would hit rock bottom for the people at the bottom.

But with UBI, the dynamic changes. If UBI pays for your basic necessities, people only need to work if they want something better than the bare minimum. The power dynamic has changed, and now all employees have leverage. No longer is it "The job pays next to nothing, but if I want a least two meals a day, I still gotta do it", and instead is "I don't need this job to survive, so they need to make it worthwhile."

In short, I would happily be in favor of dropping minimum wage laws entirely if UBI was implemented and was enough to survive off of.

0xbadc0de54• 3 years ago

Who pays the taxes that fund UBI? What happens to that economic activity under UBI? Who grows the food? Who maintains civilization if a not-insignificant percentage of it decide they can't be bothered.

LordShredda• 3 years ago

A lot of people would want more and therefore stay with their job. Society won't just simply throw their paperwork out the window and become hermits.

Sohcahtoa823• 3 years ago

Theoretically, automation takes over much of the manual labor.

Let's be real here. We absolutely have the technology to automate most farming jobs. We just need to build the machines to do it. But right now, it's cheaper to pay a bunch of illegal immigrant workers [0] cash under the table to pick crops than to hire a team of robotics and automation experts to develop a robot that does it.

The money they save in labor costs can be taxed to fund UBI.

Think long term here. Given enough time, most manual jobs can and will be automated. UBI will be a necessity as unemployment goes up as jobs are lost to automation. We're probably still 20+ years away from the tipping point, but it WILL happen.

[0] 41% of farmworkers are not authorized to work in the USA: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor/

fwungy3• 3 years ago

I'm running a political party that will give everyone $2000/month at a minimum.

If another party promises more money we will beat it by 15%. We will always give the people more money than any other party.

notact• 3 years ago

I don't understand what conclusions you can draw from an experiment with a predefined termination date like this. If I were part of this group, I would realize that in two years, I am back to supporting myself, so I would keep working the entire time. If instead I knew my basic needs would be covered for free for the rest of my life, I might just quit my job and enjoy life.

As someone else posted here a long time ago, a better way to estimate the effects of UBI on productivity is to study people living off a lottery annuity of a similar allowance.

pfannkuchen• 3 years ago

I feel like not everyone plans into the future in detail, and a lot of people make serious life choices using emotion. They might actually get a lot of useful data (though in that case it would be quite mean or exploitative towards the sample group).

SilkRoadie• 3 years ago

The sample size of thirty people is going to be too small and the two year duration is too short.

I expect that participants will be happier than average and feel more secure. On the flip side they will continue working and their lives will not change much because they can see the payments will be terminated reasonably soon.

Even with the small sample size they are splitting the trial between two locations and trying to make it representative (whatever that means). This seems to raise the risk of a lot of anomalies.

I struggle to see how any meaningful conclusions would come out of this.

joebob42• 3 years ago

One thing I don't understand: I only spend about 25-30 a year, despite making a devs salary. I think 45-50 ubi is the point where I'd just leave the workforce.

oschleic• 3 years ago

30 people.. completely pointless, the behavior of the participants would never match actual reality. Truly universal UBI would just cause price increases for everything and will never be possible in a resource scarce society. Sure you might be able to afford necessities for a few months until the market adjusts..

awaythrow483• 3 years ago

Startling conclusion: The 30 people who received a substantial amount of free money liked getting free money.

Follow up conclusion: Therefore we should give everyone cash.

emmacharp3• 3 years ago

Every time I stumble upon a thread like this one, multiple posters react with "but everybody will stop working!". I always find this reaction to be curious.

Why are we working now if, only by not being afraid of starvation and homelessness, we shall stop doing so? It seems to me only two conclusions follow:

1. It means that the actual labor market isn't free since we are essentially coerced into exchanging by fear of being destitute.

2. It means that the free market does not operate properly since if it was, the price of labor would adjust to find a new equilibrium where employers and employees satisfied by the exchange.

UBI would not induce mass idleness. It would rebalance labor relations.

Universal basic income of nearly $2000/mo to be trialed in UK for the first time

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