People kept working, became healthier while on basic income: report (2020)

> A pilot where the participants know or suspect that the money will soon stop flowing won't capture the real-world effect of this decades-long experiment that we call pensions.

There is a big difference in getting a guaranteed income in your 20’s vs your 60’s.

In your 20’s it unlocks taking big risks and swing for the fences. YC bets in this, for example. What can ambitious kids do when they don’t need to worry about money?

But when you’ve been grinding for 40 years … yeah for sure most people stop working.

> It's called retirement pensions. And what we see there is that most people, as soon as they are eligible ...

This feels like a bizarre take on quite a different arrangement.

That demographic has planned for ~40 years for tha transition, and in many cases is strongly encouraged by their industry / government / superannuation scheme, etc - to stop working at that age.

Extrapolating that back to providing a safety net to 20-40yo's just seems to miss everything about UBI - unless it's a 'I didn't have this, so no one else should' position?

All the research we're seeing - in very small, time-boxed, precarious trials - indicate that we'll probably get a positive result out of implementing this more broadly, without a drop-dead date attached.

The counter-argument always seems to be 'Oh, but we might not...' (and then some opinions).

The system that is killing our planet, that exploits and ends up killing the majority of its unwilling participants? Yeah, I don't think the loss in productivity will be a bad thing. Maybe people will consider the effect of their work before doing it a little more when they don't have a gun to their head.

If you asked me what I would spend a 'free' 10k on at 15, 25 or 35 I would have given you radically different answers. I don't expect what someone does with basic income at 65 to have much relation to what they would do at other stages in life.

> We already have something that resembles a basic income in developed countries. It's called retirement pensions.

These aren’t comparable at all. UBI programs would start at adulthood and not require any work. Someone receiving a retirement pension has put in many years of work.

> And what we see there is that most people, as soon as they are eligible for their pension, they stop working.

oh well that's cuz they're retired.

Except…people retire so they can stop working? Or they retire because they can no longer physically or mentally work.

False equivalence. People stop working during retirement because it is the very cultural expectation to not work.

There is no reason to believe this analogy you're attempting to make would transfer to something like a negative tax rate

Two points:

(1) You are correct that you cannot test UBI in a petri dish. It has to be all or nothing to see the REAL effects.

(2) If you rework UBI to be a negative income tax and remove all of government subsidies and handouts then it would have much less potential for disastrous economic impact (see Milton Friedman[0])

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

"inflationary collapse" seems contradictory. I think hyperinflation is a more correct term.

I have a hard time seeing how UBI would be fundamentally different than what exists on American Indian reservations. Is that the model that people are envisioning?

I see being an advocate for UBI as advocating for solid answers to those questions.

I would also point out that there's a difference between a full UBI, a modest partial UBI, and the kind of "basic income" that's not universal and goes away at a rate of 50c on the dollar when you earn more, like in this study. You can't slowly roll out a full UBI, but that's definitely possible for a partial UBI or a means-tested cash payment. You can dial the amount down as far as you want and still study the impact.

why not do it gradually by expanding regional pilot programs, you can't answer these questions without doing it

We already have UBI....as long as you are over 65 :-) In addition, I suppose you would agree that children should be guaranteed to have a home and 3 square meals.

So already something like half of our lives are covered by some kind of UBI. 20 years to mature, 20 years of retirement, sandwiching a 30-40 year career.

Don't forget, UBI would replace everything else. Food stamps, unemployment benefits, social security, etc etc. And literally SQUARE MILES of office building staffing bureaucrats who do means testing, fraud prevention, etc etc for government benefits would also not be required.

If you put together all of the money we spend for all of that, I wouldn't be surprised if 90%, or even 100% of the cost of a UBI could be covered.

> For those fortunate enough to have made absurd amounts of money, think of what you did when you had it.

I quit my job. A handful of my coworkers did the same.

Most people, when given the chance to stop working, they stop. Just look at pensioners, including those who get a pension at 50. The vast majority simply stop working.

Well, 25% stopped apparently. Which is somewhat telling.

If you gave me a $basicIncome raise I’d keep working; but I’d appreciate the cash.

If you guaranteed $basicIncome for life I’d restructure my life around that, and likely FIRE.

That's because the kinds of people who make those huge amounts of money usually have that ambition and lack of satisfaction. But what about the parts of society that aren't go-getting yuppie strivers? There is a vast majority of people who never consider grinding leetcode to get a job at Jane Street so that they can later pivot to B2B SAAS for timeseries data.

Time-boxed UBI experiments don't represent how people would behave if they had the benefits for life. That's not throwing rational analysis out the window. If anything, trying to extrapolate the results of a UBI pilot that didn't last 3 years is playing fast and loose with rationality.

Disabled people receive benefits because their ability to work is impeded by their disability and thus those programs don't have the same potential to disincentive work among the disabled population.

Retirement benefits do diminish older people's labor participation rates. That's the intended purpose of retirement programs. Society agrees that at a certain age people should ideally be able to relax and not work if they don't want to. Why do people protest when countries raise their retirement age? Because people don't want to have to work in their 70s or late 60s. Some do (my dad kept consulting for the fun of it), but they're probably in the minority.

> ensuring all members are at least housed and fed would not be a bad thing.

Not sure about your country, but normally those cases are covered by social security and welfare, it doesn't require helicopter money.

> Lewchuk added that while some people did stop working, about half of them headed back to school in hopes of coming back to a better job.

I believe previous UBI experiments have shown the same results: most people keep working, some people stop, but they usually have decent reasons. Education, extending parental leave, or being a caregiver aren't necessarily things we want to discourage if they result in a greater return.

> In other words: Over one quarter of people who received the checks stopped working, despite knowing that the program was temporary. This is actually a wild result when you think about it. Contrast this with the title that claims “people kept working” without qualifiers.

Half of those people stopped working so that they could go to school.

I'd also expect an even better result if working did not cancel out the UBI.

I tend to see:

"New UBI study is designed to demonstrate that productivity will increase with payments"

and then after the results are released.

"UBI study confirms that participants were happier and healthier on a UBI"

> The entire world of UBI studies is wild.

Are you counting this study in that world, given that it wasn't a UBI study? It was intended to be a continuation of the Manitoban study from the 1970s, which wasn't modelled as UBI either.

My bad, added the year to the title.

is "kept working" the point of ubi? is that how were measuring its success?

Sure, but let’s remember that “working” is not the end-all, be-all of human existence. Some will stop working and care for an aging parent. Some will stop working and raise children. Some will stop working and make art. We have the opportunity to maximize human flourishing. Let’s not mistake where we’ve been for where we’re going.

Is it best for society that everyone works a job with high enough income to contribute to taxes and that can accrue a 401k? We aren't there under current policy, there are many people left behind and experiencing negative income tax rates. But I feel this hypothetical world is the ideal posited in your example.

I think it's a fair question, and as an economist the topic fascinates me far beyond the typical econ 101 perfect world hand waving.

> Someone who knows they'll have guaranteed income for the rest of their life is more likely to stop working than someone who is told they will receive guaranteed income for a few years.

Is that true - or is that your belief?

I feel like if UBI guaranteed that I wouldn't be homeless and starve to death - but did not guarantee me avocado for my toast - I wouldn't stop working.

I can't say that for sure, but a lot of the subjective concerns expressed by people about UBI seem to think that it provides the proverbial four-bedroom-house-in-suburbia-with-two-cars-and-an-overseas-holiday-each-year, which might in fact reduce the eagerness for someone to travel two hours a day to sit in a small box and bang away at a keyboard for a third their waking life.

The B in UBI stands for Basic.

So not sure if you read this part

> Lewchuk added that while some people did stop working, about half of them headed back to school in hopes of coming back to a better job.

But they didn't just stop working, they went back to school