Finland's Basic Income Experiment Shows Recipients Are Happier and More Secure (yahoo.com) 439
An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg:
Unemployed people derive significant psychological benefits from receiving a fixed amount of financial support from the state, according to a landmark experiment into basic income in Finland that highlights the disadvantages of the country's existing means-tested system.
Initial results of the two-year study had already shown that its 2,000 participants were no more and no less likely to work than their counterparts receiving traditional unemployment benefit. Thursday's set of additional results from the social insurance institution Kela showed that those getting a basic income described their financial situation more positively than respondents in the control group. They also experienced less stress and fewer financial worries than the control group, Kela said in a statement... They had more trust in other people and social institutions, and showed more faith in their ability to have influence over their own lives, in their personal finances and in their prospects of finding employment
Finland is the first country in the world to test universal basic incomes at national level.
Initial results of the two-year study had already shown that its 2,000 participants were no more and no less likely to work than their counterparts receiving traditional unemployment benefit. Thursday's set of additional results from the social insurance institution Kela showed that those getting a basic income described their financial situation more positively than respondents in the control group. They also experienced less stress and fewer financial worries than the control group, Kela said in a statement... They had more trust in other people and social institutions, and showed more faith in their ability to have influence over their own lives, in their personal finances and in their prospects of finding employment
Finland is the first country in the world to test universal basic incomes at national level.
Study proves... (Score:2, Insightful)
financial security makes people feel financially secure.
Re:Study proves... (Score:5, Insightful)
financial security makes people feel financially secure.
But the study also shows UBI doesn't make people stop working. This, IMHO, is the most important result of this study because it removes one of the biggest objections to UBI. As an added bonus, if UBI is work neutral but increases happiness and reduces stress, it will also improve general health (hence reducing load on health services) and reduce criminality - with the corresponding savings in social and police work.
It seems to me the case for UBI is becoming stronger by the day.
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Right but if you read the whole paper, it didn't make the people getting it more likely to get a job.
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Hardly. Since well north of 40% of the population already pays zero or negative federal income taxes, any call to cut those taxes is always opposed as "Tax cuts for the rich", even as the net result is often a large increase in the number of people who are further exempted from paying those taxes and enter the zero or negative federal income tax domain. Cutting taxes for people who don't pay those taxes is a non-starter. Giving those same people free money is a different story altogether.
Re:Study proves... (Score:4, Interesting)
But the study also shows UBI doesn't make people stop working. This, IMHO, is the most important result of this study because it removes one of the biggest objections to UBI.
Honestly, I think this comparison is a sham until you agree to provide for them for life. I mean I could do things for one or three or five or ten years. But if that'd totally fuck my chances of ever getting back in a job as an old geezer with a ten year gap in his CV, well... I'd not do it. Until you say it's a gravy train all the way in, no need to actually do something I'll consider it a temporary reprieve. You got though the basic messaging, but as data it's junk.
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...no benefit.
Are people not reading even the article titles anymore before replying? The title clearly says recipients are happier and more secure. You can perhaps argue the price is not worth it, but this is a benefit right there.
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The burden of proof is on the proposers (Score:2, Insightful)
The people who are proposing the radical program are the people who must explain why they are correct to take resources from people at the point of a gun in order to redistribute them.
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None of those ever had UBIs, you dense clod.
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"Whether you stand or you lay, three thousands is the pay", "we fake we work, the government fakes it pays us". For everyone except dissidents, there was effectively a guarantee of employment. Even if you were drinking at work every day, you didn't get fired as long as you showed up. No one cared about the quality of work. There were also organized vacations, etc. Any consumer goods were at a permanent shortage, and even if you actually found them in a shop (after queues of truly epic length), many com
Re: Doesn't prove UBI provides financial security (Score:5, Informative)
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It's still wealth redistribution at the bottom.
As such, there's no real incentive to achieve.
Re: Doesn't prove UBI provides financial security (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you figure? Getting a trickle of free money doesn't remove your incentive to achieve. Would you really just stop working if you started getting a $1000 UBI check every month?
Of course not, not unless you're a complete slacker with low standards. So long as contributing to society lets you improve your standard of living substantially, most people will do so. What removes the incentive to achieve is a system where working harder either has no effect, or actually causes a reduction in your standard of living - the current so-called "welfare cliff" that is faced by virtually anyone trying to get out of poverty in a wealthy nation.
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Yes, there is.
95% of all people in the "welfare business" will be obsolet. So you safe more money by simply paying UBI then paying your welfare apparatus.
Combine that with a tax reform, 90% of all civil servants working in the tax related ministries are obsolet, too.
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Talk about a strawman.
Neither of those had any kind of UBI, nor did any communist country ever. They had something more akin to the Republicans' work for welfare (yes, I know it was signed by Bill Clinton, but it was part of Gingrich's Contract with America). You weren't given money, you were given a job, which you had to take - hence the communist countries' boast that they have zero unemployment. The jobs were based not so much on your preferences or skills, but on political activity and/or family ties. I
Re: Doesn't prove UBI provides financial security (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. Your education might have been based on family ties, you never got a good job based on it, if you lacked the education.
You're so full of it, I can't even believe. I spent the first half of my life in a former communist country for chrissake, and you show up with this nonsense.
Look - the better the jobs, the more the political clout mattered. In particular, you couldn't get a leadership job without being a party member in good standing. Yes, many skilled people did play the political game as a necessary step in the search for a good job, and make no mistake: it was the political activity that got them the jobs - that they were any good was not a requirement, but at most a bonus. In some cases, it was even a point of suspicion.
Here's an immediate counter-example to your "never get a good job if you lacked the education": Romania's Elena Ceausescu. Her highest education level was primary school - when she tried to go to night school she got expelled for cheating. Despite being an absolute intellectual nullity, she got a job as a research scientist at ICECHIM (the National Institute for Chemical Research) - a really good position for somebody in the field of chemistry. She even got a PhD and got elected to the Romanian Academy - her title (that she never got tired of repeating) ended up being "Academician Doctor Engineer".
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Yes, those tried to make things work before we were on the brink of having robots do everything for us.
Let's try it again once humans aren't actually needed for most kinds of manual labor.
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Long-term effects on labour supply cannot be inferred. Though the experiment was intended to test short-term labour supply effects as compared to current welfare schemes, design issues led to unclear results. The zero difference between treatment and control group in employment tells us little about the relative effects from abolishing the welfare trap and eliminating conditions to access welfare The treatment and control group were also not sufficiently different, which might have biased results towards zero. Moreover, the fact the policy tested is not revenue-neutral,undermines its value as policy guidance.
There was no difference in employment at all; if you were more productive, you could increase your value of employment. But that wasn't found.
What was found, though, was it spent a lot more money to do UBI and unemployment, so it's net expense to be paid somehow...
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Perhaps not, but why is that a problem if it is a convenient side effect? Particularly given the positive impact that feeling more secure and happy about life in general is liable to end up having on their productivity?
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Costs. We spend about $600 billion a year [pewresearch.org] on income security (welfare, unemployment insurance, etc) at the Federal level. There are about 217 million people [census.gov] between the ages of 18 and 65 - UBI recipients. Give each of them $630 per month (the equivalent to 560 Euros - as in this experiment), and we'd spend around $1.6 trillion - an increase of 173% in income security spending. We just added another $1 trillion to the national debt, every year.
Is making sure everyone feels good about themselves (with dub
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How are the benefits dubious? The study concluded that UBI did *NOT* discourage people from working.
The fact that it did not appear to encourage people to work any more than they already did is irrelevant... while there is otherwise a very well known correlation between a person's sense of well being and satisfaction with their life and work with their productivity... so given that there was no decrease in employment, I'd say that the benefits are obvious, not dubious.
Indirect, perhaps... but definite
10 Years... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:This actually ties in... (Score:4, Interesting)
but also a healthy respect for it being offered.
In other words, a reminder of who your benevolent overlords are, to whom you owe allegiance.
Not a national level test (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just noise (Score:2)
The only representative experiment would be if they would offer:
- a living wage,
- until the end of their lives,
- for minimum wage workers.
The amount of people who quit their jobs should tell you if UBI is feasible at all, or not.
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Do you have any stats to back up this assertion?
You don't need stats. People are lazy and greedy, because that's how evolution works.
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Right. But then again, nobody has stats to show that this will work, and we cannot do a full scale experiment. So, all that's left is to engage our brains and think logically.
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Yes, and? What is your argument?
If you look carefully most western societies are run that way already ... 30% do government work, bottom line only farmers, miners and perhaps energy production does "work". The rest is mindless science fiction "keep them busy, so they don't revolt" work. In other words: a huge deal of the population "works" without really contributing anything and is payed by taxes, which are taken from the few that *really work*. That zero sum game gets even more absurd when you realize tha
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UBI is a garbage idea and would destroy any country that tried to run itself that way. Plain and simple. Only takes basic arithmetic to prove that, no PhD in anything required. All other arguments amount to Magical Thinking.
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Get over having to work. (Score:2, Insightful)
As automation improves and less work is needed, we need to get over this ancient idea that one must work to make a living. Work is necessary for our mental health, but meaningful work - work that we find interesting and engaging - is what makes us happy.
And it funny how many people have a problem with lower class people not having to work, but a someone who inherited billions and site back and does nothing and collects dividends from their investments in say student loan lenders is A-OK: they still aren't
But.... (Score:2, Redundant)
...how do the taxpayers feel about it?
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UBI is just another welfare program, but on a bigger scale, and less efficient because the amounts are all the same, rather than optimized for each particular circumstance.
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Wong. It is more efficient, because oodles of money are not wasted on deciding what assign to whom. Pretty much all serious calculations show this.
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The numbers are easy: ... actually the number is about 4 times as high) ... surprise surprise, Die Bundesargentur für Arbeit. The government agency managing unemployment and social aid payments. They employ close to 100,000 people.
2018 in Germany about 1.1million people receive social aid or unemployment aid (officially
At the same time, the biggest employer in Germany, which is
So for every ten people receiving social aid from the state, the state employs one worker. Pays for the office, etc. p.p.
LOL, yeah, until they run out of money! (Score:2)
Not a good test of UBI at the national level (Score:2)
Just giving a couple of people some money called UBI instead of a similar amount of money as "unemployment benefit" is not "a test of UBI at the national level". UBI in different incarnations has many implications, and without adding it all together the test doesn't really test UBI...
others (Score:3)
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That's just how people work. They assess their lives relative to their peers. If you earn $100,000 a year, but all your friends are earning $1,000,000, you are still going to feel like an underachiever. If you work sixty hours a week, and you see someone else who is just as well-off working zero hours, then you are going to see a bastard who doesn't deserve anything.
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Bottom line that is the interesting question.
Under real UBI everyone gets UBI. Surprisingly the "working" ones are worried that the non working get UBI and neglect completely that they themselves (and their kids) receive it too.
Traditional unemployment benefit (Score:2)
What are the strings attached to "traditional" unemployment benefit in Finland?
Incentivisation falsified? (Score:2)
Re: Not seen as success in Finland (Score:3)
It wasn't even a proper UBI.
The people who received it had some marginal taxes reduced, not eliminated.
They had some beuracracy for claiming their benefit reduced, not eliminated.
Re: Less worry (Score:5, Informative)
Why? Seriously, what's the resulting benefit from unemployed people worrying about money?
I suspect that you think people cannot be motivated to find jobs unless they worry about money. Now as a Finn who if his taxes only paid for UBI would pay for at least two UBI recipients here, I'm inclined to think that people can be just as motivated and certainly more capable of finding jobs if what drives them is not desperation to survive but a desire to have more of the extras you can get with money once your basic needs are covered (basic in a First World country being food, a home, health care and internet access). Extras being things such as holiday travel, a bigger home, new car etc... Or simply put: Did you stop trying to get a raise once you could pay your rent and buy food? If not, why do you think unemployed people would be content with the minimum and not try to get more too? The idea of UBI is not to make people choose not to work. It's to ensure through a simple mechanism that everyone has the basics (It's sort of in the name UB...).
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The problem is that any job under the UBI scheme would be heavily taxed, because that's where the UBI money is coming from.
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Your basic needs are covered
Great. So why do I need a job?
so even if the government takes 70%
Wouldn't I be better off doing something that I enjoy rather than working and handing 70% of my wages over to the government? I could grow my own crops. And trade the excess to my neighbor, who's hobby as a seamstress can provide me with clothes.
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If you know the money is part of a study and that it can and will go away some day, your incentive to keep working is different.
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A UBI scheme covers your basic needs. That's all. Enough to get a minimally comfortable home and essential needs met. Life above the poverty line, but not by much. If you want more, you still have to work for it - but you get to decide how much more, and you don't have to worry that unemployment will lead you to ruin.
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You need a job so you can afford the newest cell phone, computer upgrades, those really juicy steaks from the butcher and so on.
Having enough money to get by without worrying about starving or being homeless next month is not the same as living a life of wild luxury.
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Great. So why do I need a job? ... ...
To go to the cinema.
To have booze for the weekend.
To make a 2 weeks vacation trip to where it is warmer.
To have Christmass presents for your family or friends.
To buy a book.
To go out eating instead of eating at home
And so on
Are you retarded?
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Nice try, comrade.
In the Soviet Union, the most productive plots of land by far were the small family plots that the Party allowed people to maintain. Without these, there would have been far more starvation. And as for the seamstress, let HER decide whether her time is better spent trading straight across for food (and other goods that local 'hobbyists' produce) or working for the system at 30 cents on the dollar.
Take 70% of a people's earnings away from them and people will just step outside of the curr
Re: Less worry (Score:5, Insightful)
> Why? Seriously, what's the resulting benefit from unemployed people worrying about money?
Because if they're not desperate, they can't be exploited! How can I underpay and overwork my employees if they have the financial security to quit on the spot! Or worse... take their time finding a job that's right for them! They might even try to start their own business and compete with me!
All I'd have left to keep the proletariat in check is employer-provided health insurance, and they're trying to rob me of that, too!
=Smidge=
Re: Less worry (Score:5, Insightful)
And if you're unwilling to work, the only way you survive is on the charity of others.
There are quite a few things wrong with this statement.
First, the assumption that poverty's unique cause is "being a lazy fuck", when all it takes is "willingness to work". Unfortunately this is absolutely wrong - and pretty much invalidates the rest of your argument. There are lots of cases where willingness is not enough. You need to be of the right age, be relatively healthy, have no major handicaps, have the skills that happen to be in demand, and live in an area where jobs are available and pay enough to live. Just willingness won't help if you're too young or too old, if you're sick, if you simply don't have the capability to do some jobs. Not everybody can lift heavy loads, for example, or be a coder or a musician, or whatever. And, with technology automating more and more jobs, many people will simply be left behind - no matter how willing they are to work, the available jobs won't lift them out of poverty. This becomes more and more of an issue - and brings us to the second fault with your statement.
Your second wrong assumption is that charity is the only way to survive. It's not. When pushed too hard, when too many people become impoverished, they will not "STARVE" quietly in a corner. Instead, they'll turn to the other way to survive: they'll take what they need from the people who have it in surplus - via theft, revolt, revolution. The resulting social upheaval will impact everybody - even you.
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I would rather have my tax dollars pay for UBI than pay for prison.
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Are you functionally illiterate? The research project found that IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE. You want people to suffer for no good reason. Makes you evil scum.
Re:Less worry (Score:5, Insightful)
Your argument isn't evidence-based. The counter-evidence to your point is presented in the article summary: recipients of the UBI were no less likely to work than those on unemployment benefits with a you-must-look-for-work component. Your point: already debunked by the study in question. Go get better evidence if you think you know better. If you think this study is wrong, all the more reason to have more studies to prove that. So far, no UBI study backs up your point.
The main thing here is that giving UBI is significantly less-expensive than hiring the army of petty bureaucrats needed to police the poor to make sure they're looking for work. Making them jump through hoops doesn't in fact make them more likely to get a job, so that component is actually a waste of time and taxpayers money (paying a basic allowance isn't a waste of taxpayers money BTW because the alternative is to house much of the poor in prison, which costs about 10 times as much as just giving people basic food and housing and letting them take care of themselves).
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Did the participants know the study could end at any time? How was this knowledge controlled for?
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Objection often isn't based in economics, but in morality. People feel deeply unhappy with the idea that their hard-earned money might be going to people who didn't work nearly as hard for it.
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Why? Seriously... if they are being paid fairly for the work that they are doing, what difference should it make that money is being given to others for doing less? It does not devalue the work they do in any way, and I would suggest that any unhappiness one might feel about it would be more likely tied to disatisfaction in their current position unless they are predisposed to displaying an overdeveloped sense of entitlement.
Which I suppose I can't dismiss the possibility of being common, but honestly,
Re: Less worry (Score:5, Insightful)
There's also the fact that low-income people spend almost every cent they receive. In terms of GDP growth, that's a good job-creator. A dollar isn't just a dollar: every time that dollar is spent that's GDP that's created. Google "fiscal multipliers". $1 in food stamps was found to create about $1.75 in extra GDP. That's because if you give $1 to a poor person who wouldn't have had that money otherwise, then they spend all of it, and it creates jobs as it's spent and passed around. It makes the most economic sense to increase taxes in areas with a LOW fiscal multiplier and spend them on areas with a HIGH fiscal multiplier. It just happens that money earned by the ultra-rich has a very low fiscal multiplier and giving money to the ultra-poor has a very high fiscal multiplier. So, you can justify taking money out at the top of the wealth pyramid and injecting it at the bottom on a purely rational self-interest basis for the working and middle-class, without even appealing to any ethical or emotional sentiment. If you told a computer "maximize GDP" it would increased taxes on the rich and give the money to those who otherwise wouldn't have money to spend.
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If you don't support people with basic food you'll end up paying even more taxes to support sticking way more people in prison. USA has 2 million inmates, who cost between $30000 - $60000 each to house per year depending on what state you live on.
If you let people starve to save money, some of them will turn to crime to survive. You'll end up paying a lot more in increased taxes for prisons, police etc. Your community becomes more militarized, and you end up with beggars everywhere, street crime etc. So you
Re: Less worry (Score:3)
We've had 70 or so years of not letting the poor starve and we've seen unparalleled improvements in technology, lifespan and standard of living as people who could've died young are now creating things. I don't understand why these morons want to throw that away.
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there simply won't be possibility for that many people to be productive
Bullshit.
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How would you construct the study?
Ask the participants to give each other a paycheck.
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Initial results of the two-year study had already shown that its 2,000 participants . . .
Whether people receiving UBI are more or less happy is irrelevant. Giving away free money to 2,000 people is easy. Giving it to 100 Million people, not so much.
Giving a meaningful amount of money to a large percentage of the population is unsustainable. Period.
Re:Finland's UBI experiment shows deadbeats are ha (Score:5, Insightful)
Initial results of the two-year study had already shown that its 2,000 participants . . .
Whether people receiving UBI are more or less happy is irrelevant.
It very much is not. Takes 2 braincells to rub together to see that and you are obviously lacking. People that are happier are less sick and more willing to buy stuff, both which are of significant benefit economically.
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People that are happier are less sick and more willing to buy stuff, both which are of significant benefit economically.
If you give away a trillion dollars, of course the people receiving it will be happy and spend it.
But the people paying the taxes to fund it will be less happy and have less to spend.
We had a trade deficit of $621B last year. That is the gap between what America consumes and what we produce. "More spending" is the last thing we need especially when much of it is going to Asia. We will just have less investment and even bigger deficits. Incentives to be productive would do a lot more good than incentives
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Plus, offshoring of manufacturing and so on not only leads to trade deficits, but a notable secondary effect is loss of jobs in the same industries at home.
For some reasons most economists don't talk about that one very much, but it's very important.
It doesn't matter how cheap your goods are, if you don't have a job to pay for them. Yes, employment is booming now, but part of that is because many manufacturing jobs have been brought back home.
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Broken window fallacy?
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Of course people with a safety net are happier and feel more secure. Anybody who needs to do a study to find that out is brain-dead.
BUT... this is NOT the first national-level UBI system to be tested. Their neighbors in Sweden implemented a very similar -- but not exactly the same -- program back in the 1970s. For practical purposes it was a UBI: if you were not working, you simply got a check from the government, basically no questions asked. And it was
Re:Finland's UBI experiment shows deadbeats are ha (Score:5, Insightful)
Sweden implemented a very similar -- but not exactly the same -- program back in the 1970s. For practical purposes it was a UBI: if you were not working, you simply got a check from the government, basically no questions asked.
That's not UBI. The "U" means universal, which means you receive it even if you work.
The fake UBI that you described doesn't give anything to working people, which results in perverse incentives. Be a lazy bum and everything's good, but if you put in some effort, the system stops helping you. It actively discourages people from working.
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Until it tells you "no"
"No" sounds an awful lot like "gulag".
Um.... evidence? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it only poor people getting financial security that ends all drive to do anything else? I mean, nobody ever calls the Job Creators out for that behavior because they don't do it. It's almost as if yes, you can motivate people with starvation but, no, you don't need to.
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Also human nature: If you don't need to work to survive, but you DO need to work to get all the nice things, you will do at least some work. The work may be different from sitting in an office pressing an ink-stained COPY stamp on pieces of paper, but it will still be some kind of work. Perhaps we will see more artists, more independent musicians and story writers, theater actors, all those uncertain-income things that people don't do now because they need to feed their families.
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I don't need any money to survive. My wife has a farm. Nevertheless I work ...
I guess you simply don't know many people ... sad.
Sorry, but did you not read my post (Score:2)
The only thing the constant threat of death does is keep people in their place. It drives people to be conservative (that's little 'c' conservative, i.e. opposing to change, not "Politically Conservative", meaning far right wing and leaning towards or outright celebrating authoritarian leaders in the oligarchy). This lets the folks at
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But from his own point of view he WOULD have been better off playing it safe.
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However you are trolling this forum with your anti UBI posts ... perhaps every of your posts should be modded "troll"?
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Attention Rick Schumann: Have a look at actual numbers before you disgrace yourself. For example, the Swiss have them.
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Re:In before... (Score:4, Funny)
With iron-clad reasoning and command of the facts such as this, you can tell the world is in very good hands.