Lots of good discussion in the comments, I know this topic by nature is a little controversial. Thank you for the enthusiasm, everyone! Just wanted to address a few common themes: 1. Yes, Milton Friedman's idea for a negative income tax works quite differently to this form of monthly income UBI. Should have made that clearer in the video. Let me know if you want a follow-up video on that. 2. Some people are saying that it's fine to be poorer if they're happier. The study did measure this and people were NOT happier in the long run. Happiness increased from year 1, but disappeared by year 3. People simply habituated to the higher income. openresearch-web.files.svdcdn.com/production/assets/documents/Documentation/w32784.pdf?dm=1723679143 3. Some people are saying that working less and spending more on leisure should improve physical and mental health. The study also measured this and found no improvements, not even a small improvement in physical health. Mental health was boosted in year 1 (as you would expect) but disappeared by year 2. Again, people just habituated to the money. openresearch-web.files.svdcdn.com/production/assets/documents/Documentation/w32711.pdf?dm=1721432661 4. And finally, yes, a true UBI study can never be done unless you truly give everyone in the country the money, which yes, will have a greater impact on things like inflation. Valid point. So in summary, this study showed that UBI (in the form of $1000 per month) makes Americans poorer ($1000 on average), with no long-term improvements in happiness, physical health, mental health or financial stability.
To be worried about basics is also a problem. People can't see the big picture. There are many different incentives to make more people work than forced labor. Another point is that there are places where people work for the sake of working. Producing nothing good or pollution. You can't make those unhealthy to work or work in bad conditions when they don't need to.
You may see things change with the next generations. That is also something to consider. Parents' problems equal the problems of children. But you need more than just UBI.
To be clear, Milton Friedman didn't like UBI or negative income tax. He's made clear, that if he were compelled to come up with something like UBI at gunpoint it'd be a negative income tax.
Milton Friedman's beliefs changed over his lifetime. When he was younger and made his contributions to economics, he supported the NIT pretty wholeheartedly. Capitalism and Freedom Ch. 7: > Suppose one accepts, **as I do**, this line of reasoning as justifying governmental action to alleviate poverty; to set, as it were, a floor under the standard of life of every erson in the community. There remain the questions, how much and how. I see no way of deciding "how much" except in terms of the amount of taxes we - by which I mean the great bulk of us- are willing to impose on ourselves for the purpose Later, he got more involved in politics, stopped/slowed research, and his beliefs changed. Free to Choose > Most of the present welfare programs should never have been enacted. If they had not been, many of the people now dependent on them would have become self-reliant ndividuals instead of wards of the state. In the short run that might have appeared cruel for some, leaving them no option to low-paying, unattractive work. But in the long run it would have been far more humane. However, given that the welfare programs exist, they cannot simply be abolished overnight. We need some way to ease the transition from where we are to where we would like to be, of providing assistance to people now dependent on welfare while at the same time encouraging an orderly transfer of people from welfare rolls to payrolls.
I was under the impression that at least in his later years, he did advocate for it since he said it would be impossible to get rid of welfare. It's been a while though so I could be wrong
Those who advocate UBI and research it are ambitious people who enjoy work and prioritize career. As an Industrial Psychologist I would see senior managers projecting their own drive and motivation onto staff. A common theme was "if they had more involvement they would work harder". They didn't, at the shop floor level most employees did not want more responsibility or involvement, they wanted to do the job and leave at the shift end and not think about work until the next day. Those who were ambitious applied for promotion and rapidly advanced off the shop floor and left the others behind. There is an assumption in those who promote UBI that everyone wants more money not more time in the bar/bed/TV etc when there is no evidence for that at all. If there is evidence a lot of it points the other way; that a significant proportion of the population are very happy doing nothing. Look at those who inherit wealth, do they all work hard and achieve? No, despite the absence of any financial strain many lead idle lives and turn to drugs and drink. Wealth alone does not prevent idleness or create productivity.
Perfect comment that should be pinned to the top. I also think a lot of these smart, ambitious, educated people, coming up with UBI plans, are just projected their own motivations onto poor, ignorant, lazy people who would be the most affected by free money dropping on their laps.
I think its a bit disengenous and assumptive to claim people are lazy and want to do nothing without consitering that maybe they are simply overworked or maybe they just are not as interested in working for somebody else's company as they are in working to build something themself.
Thank you. I think HONEST psychology is not involved enough when we deal with economic issues. People are more complex than productivity numbers. Great comment.
@@LukeSkydragonif you explore the world, you will see that this is mostly true, only a segment of society is really driven. The rest is a mix of lazy but most of all “just content” people. The content people part is more clearly seen in places outside the USA where the materialistic propaganda is not so strong. Humans mostly just wanna get by and if they can work less for it, the better.
These people want more time at the bar/bed/tv. Giving them UBI helps with this. So lets give them UBI. We don't want a future with vast wealth but everyone too busy working their backsides off to enjoy the wealth.
Milton Friedman's UBI "negative income tax" system also required all other forms of welfare and social programs be eliminated, and that the UBI proportionally decrease as people had income of their own.
@@99EKjohn Friedman literally said that if someone held a gun to his head and made him deliver UBI, he would deliver a negative tax for low income earners. Friedman didn't 'invent' UBI either. The definition is right there in the name. Universal = everyone gets it (not means tested) Basic = ideally enough to cover cost of living, Income = Money (Not food stamps)
_"In my opinion, lump sum (UBI payment) is better."_ Look, if you're talking about giving smart kids just out of school a "graduation gift" type of UBI, maybe you're right. But I grew up poor, in a poor neighborhood, among generationally poor people. Giving the average person I grew up with a lump sum of $40,000 would not have helped them escape poverty. It would have helped them dress REALLY well for a few months
I think everyone is not being truthful about why we work in the first place. This study only proves that. We work not just to work but because we have too. That is why get 'rich quick schemes' are so attractive. We all have different interests and if we had the money to then we would invest in them. Another truth is that sometimes people just want a simple life. Lets be real, UBI was made so that we all have a baseline. While some want more than others and this would only help them, others are simple and truly do not need a lot to be happy/peaceful.
I dont know if that's totally true. A lot of wealthy retirement age+ people continue working because they want to work, some work until they absolutely can't anymore. Not everybody stops working the minute they no longer have to.
@@Llortnerof I mean, to some extent people do. But that tends to be the case more with attractive jobs, the jobs at the bottom often have horrid conditions, and scum of the earth for managers. I'd think UBI would teach people to be better, at least it seems to me that there's a pretty strong correlation between social safety nets, and quality of lower end employers(e.g. north european work culture is better than almost anywhere else, for the bottom of the ladder)
@@iverbrnstad791 If you check the jobs, it's basically always those they can freely choose to do or not do and choose their clients for. In a way, it's more of a hobby they happen to get paid for. Those that do work because they need money pretty much never fall into that.
Ok, the UBI Trial didn't make poor people act like a higher social class, long time horizons, conscientiousness, etc. this does puncture the narrative that people will stop acting poor if you give them money. So this is a check on too-optimistic stories about social reform via simple economic and policy interventions. It does pretty directly refute the argument that poverty is mainly caused by the stress of not having enough money. But it doesn't say much at all about whether UBI would be a workable response to mass unemployment. The need there is avoid total humanitarian and economic disaster. Most poor people come from generations of poor people. They've learned how to survive while poor. Even if you consider this to be an entirely socially constructed inheritance it would take generations for the class structure to adapt to the new conditions.
Yeah, I would really be interested in psychological perspective - what was going in their minds, what motivations they had, what emotions they had, etc. After encountering psychological problems myself and reading/viewing/listening about psychology, I've got to say that human mind is a very irrational place, by default dominated by emotions. Intelligence is often "recruited" by emotions to justify behaviours which from outside perspective look non-sensical or even self-destructive.
@@Hexanitrobenzene Hand-to-mouth is a very particular mode of existence. If you get some money you spend it: if you don't, somebody/something will come and take it. It sounds crazy from the outside but it works. A worse mode involves drugs (including alcohol). BEFORE anything else you've got to establish basic sense of wellbeing (like getting in out of the storm and getting warm). Wonder why, when the plant shuts down (and there should be less money to buy stuff) there's a huge drug-boom?
The timeframe is the greatest flaws in the study is timeframe, as well as time to recover from living u see financial duress for so long. For example, People need time to recover from acute stressors such as shock to unexpected job loss. Most people might require a week to rest from such an event. It is not surprising to hear that people who have been money poor seek leisure(rest). From the chronic impact of poverty stress and the physical toll of working one or even two jobs for so long. Furthermore, this study would have an effect that is not discussed and that is UBI will end when the study ends. This would undoubtedly have an effect on the individuals desire to use UBI in the way that is theorized. If you get UBI for a year but now it will end then most impoverished people will use UBI in a manner that tackles short term gains. Behaviors take time to change as well as time to feel safe.
It would be similar to when a young person gets a credit card for the first time and they get into debt right away. They just don't know how to manage it. But if you had UDI plus universal healthcare, wages that increase with inflation and job security, you would see a change, like it did after WW2 with all those housing provisions. Also, If you are participating in a study that will give you money but only for 3 years, you might as well spend it, because you know it will go away.
@robmacl7 This reminds me of the concept of the New Rich vs. The Old Rich. The New Rich buys extravagant, but wasteful things because they can now buy whatever their heart desires, but the Old Rich is used to having money and had years of being taught about personal finances, budgeting, investing, and in some cases, knowing how to find legal financial loopholes, so they don't flash their money and it lasts for much longer. A person living in generations of poverty won't become the Old Rich in 3 years; it's not even long enough to raise a new generation with that money.
My first thoughts on people working less when they have some guaranteed income is that they didn't work that much less. Rounding up to 2hr a week is 104hrs a year. Looking at am 8 hour days five days a weeks thats the same as taking a 2 week vacation and 3 sick day. Seems like a bit of security was able to make up for a bad employments contract and lax labour laws.
This whole study is a massive series of question marks. The fact it was during covid where virtually eveyone sat at home and did nothing makes the whole study meaningless. Also these economic theories seem to be totally different from what I've read about UBI. The whole premise is you restructure your economy. You get rid of the minimum wage, and you have a smooth gradient between employed and unemployed. In the current system it's binary you're either employable or you're not, if you're employable there's a good chance you're trapped in the bulge of people who can't make more than minimum wage. The point is nobody in the minimum wage bulge nor the unemployed have any incentive to be more productive. That's horrible for the economy. The idea is to create a smooth transition in wages. If you're less productive than minimum wage you're unemployable, you need to meet that minimum bar. The narrative being produced is that under productive people will fix themselves. When it's the total opposite, employers would become better at employing the unproductive. The gain to the economy would be a steeper gradient in wages. That way people make way more from working hard or substantially less for not being productive. In the current economy, two people of radically different productivity levels get paid roughly the same amount via minimum wage. Like even if you're lazy, you'd rather work 20 hours a week for $8 an hour, than work 40 for $4 an hour. Being twice as productive is a huge benefit to the economy if you look at it from the employers perspective. It also creates an economic environment where employers want their people to improve.
@@caiparry-jones9775 My understanding was that it would provide a basic guaranteed income even for those who didn't work. I believe the general layout (for Milton Friedman's version) was as follows, I will use simple numbers to explain (it's been a while so this may be off a little and I do not remember which numbers he proposed specifically): -Set a median income - well say $100k -Set the rate - well say 20% -Then you get taxed or subsidized 20% of the difference between your income and the median income So if you make $0 (unemployed) you are 100k away from the median income ($100k) so you get subsidized 20% of that which is $20k = $20k total income If you make $20k in income, you are $80k away from $100k so you get 20% of that difference which is $16k = $36k total If you make $90k in income, you are $10k away from $100k so you get 20% of that difference which is $2k = $92k total If you make $150k you are $50k above the $100k which means you pay 20% of that difference ($50k) which means you pay $10k in taxes = $140k take home income
@@caiparry-jones9775 The goal of UBI is to lift those who are stuck. It won't do anything to those who voluntarily chose it (yes, some homeless are self-directed). But I agree it is not universal (shouldn't be). I also agree that negative income tax is better than UBI and has the lump sum effect Pete is talking about (which I agree). If they gonna implement UBI, it has to be case by case basis since some people also don't know what is causing them to 'stuck' and UBI needs to consider and solve it as a part of the program
The condemnation is that UBI makes people poorer. Which in a vacuum is super devastating. It would be fine if UBI simply maintained the increased 36k net worth, or even just maintained the same net worth, but they got poorer.
If people worked less and both net and individual/household wealth increased, that would be one thing. What we saw instead was that not only did the program consume wealth from the funders (in a real implementation this would be middle class tax payers), it actually made the recipients less wealthy too. This is despite the fact the average American could see a substantial increase in long term economic status simply by paying off credit card debts, something which requires zero effort to do with a stack of free money.
The first question that came to my mind was simply: were the participants generational poor or recently laid-off workers that had otherwise a long work history but were hitting hard times? I believe there might be a need for basic financial education for the first group, or even both groups. Getting out of generational poverty is a lot harder, because your whole family and support system is made of other poor people. You might not even have a single family member who has experienced moderate success in their life. So, as an individual, you might not even have a single role model. Maybe pairing this study with a weekly visit from a social worker would have increased the chances of success? (but yeah, there was the pandemic...)
I don't know about that. Lots of dirt poor immigrants arrive I. America and are able to figure a way out of poverty. So it's not so much a poverty frame of mind but an entitled spoiled viewpoint.
The problem is not UBI, it’s capitalism. UBI makes people more dependent on money , capitalism makes it even more scarce so that it can exploit natural and Human Resources. You want society to become rich, don’t give them Money, give them power to be independent.
Plusmartini, that's literally what capitalism is, giving power to individuals to be independent. UBI doesn't work because it does the opposite of being independent. Capitalism does not make resources scarce, it makes them abundant, something even Marx admitted. And funnily enough, looking at Marx's life, it starts to seem apparent that we need a system where people are able to be independent and own things instead of relaying on their fellow political philosopher's money (Marx depended heavily on Engels), I wonder what's a system that advocates for individual power, market freedoms and liberties...
The lumpsum UBI would be atrocious. I'm not saying this would be a perfect corelation, but look at lottery winners. When people don't know how to manage their finances, they go broke and burn through any money they're given. What people need is to realize the value of how long it will take them to earn a significant amount of money on their own. When you realize that new car's price tag is equivalent to 10 months of you working, you start to re-think how you are managing and valuing the money you have and earn.
poor analogy. most lottery winners opted for a singular payment at the start (instead of payments at fixed intervals), resulting in a sudden influx of cash at a quantity beyond their comprehension. I imagine UBI recipients have at least seen that much money at some point in their lives, and know its purchasing power.
UBI is just dumb bec there are just dumb people -- there is no realization. People that become rich when they are poor have a managed budget and live within their means while trying to find good work that can exponentially grow while learning on the side. When you ask them they find creative ways to get free stuff to lower their expenses. UBI just helps dumb people to survive basically not showing them reality. It would lead to worse results especially when such programs stop.
Lottery players is a poor co-hort of people to study for responsibility with money. UBI would go to all that need it. Which means some idiots sure. But also smarter people.
Your logic is flawed. Lottery winners are by definition, people who play the lottery. Playing the lottery is a pretty 1-1 correlation with poor financial choices, and isn't representative of the populace as a whole. Additionally, lottery lump sum is of a significantly higher amount, and is also by definition not universal. That has a lot of effects involving social connection and isolation, which exacerbate the problems you were talking about.
@IARRCSim Economics. What I've been talking about refers not to what I plan to study (food supply chain analytics), but rather, it was a one-sided interpretation of the ratio of revenue to the number of employees. As if you come to the company, *you* immediately earn that much money... Which is bollocks
I did want to add a little bit on the Friedman part , Friedman was not in favor of UBI in the modern sense, where everyone receives a flat payment regardless of whether they work. His negative income tax concept was work-contingent, meaning that it provided a safety net but still incentivized people to work. He saw UBI, which provides unconditional payments, as problematic because it could discourage work and create a dependency on government aid. And he still never trusted government to be able to implement it. Friedman often talked about the fact that work is one of the main ways to maintain human dignity And self reliance. Additionally no amount of money can change culture
The effect that I bet is obscured by study design here is that, if UBI is, in fact, universal in a pretty-much closed system like a city or a state, in a society with a rentier class, prices of the bottom tier of rented assets and purchased consumables will rise to absorb and obviate the UBI. So even if recipients are somehow made to be financially adept, “market forces” still ensure a subsistence tier in society.
It's inflationary. The way I see it is it would essentially always be not enough, because no matter how much you increase it to, it effectively would become the new "zero". I don't really see how it's different to how unemployment benefits work here in NZ, where we have families that haven't worked for 4 generations.
So your assumption is that the economy is a zero sun game, the existence of the poor is required for the rest of us to have some level of comfort? We can never improve things because they will just reset to the next lowest level?
@@ctrlaltdebug I think you're wrong. It's the same as miminum wage and unemployment benefits. It's inflationary because the price of everything rises to meet the new amount almost immediately, so nobody us better off than they were before. Inflation isn't just caused by money printing.
@teagancombest6049 It will always be a Pareto distribution. Pareto distributions are in nature, so to me it's a law of nature. Attempts at wealth redistribution always result in perverse outcomes and always fail at achieving the intended goal. This is because the buyer and seller decide on value, not the government or any other third party in a transaction. When government attempts to redistribute value through something like a UBI, it creates a short-term anomaly in the economy, before it naturally goes back to an equilibrium that looks pretty similar to what it was before the redistribution occurred. A UBI would simply devalue the currency and probably cause a massive capital flight due to the huge taxes required to pay for it. It simply won't work. Currency is a token of value. Value has to come from somewhere, usually goods, services, commodities ect. If you pay everyone for nothing, then nothing of value is being exchanged for that money, and over time that causes the money itself to be worthless. And arguing that people who receive a UBI will still work because they want to work is an argument that comes from people who are privileged enough to have never experienced the really crappy jobs most of us have to endure. If I could earn a living doing nothing, I'd quit yesterday. My job is destroying my health. UBI is essentially "I can't believe it's not real communism"
I fail to see how "people when given free money, choose to spend their time in enjoyable ways more, rather than working for money" is either a shocking discovery or a failure.
Because the people who propose UBI are either intentionally deceptive (like those advocating for welfare) or stupid. Welfare, since its inception, has caused a complete stagnation in wages (along side women entering the workforce in full). UBI makes everyone a net negative on society unless they pay, in taxes, more than they earn from UBI. Problem being, people are naturally lazy. You offer them free stuff, and they will destroy it in not time flat. Look at “the projects” in chicago. No, people need to earn their way. If they aren’t required to, society will collapse almost instantly
You are grossly simplifying this topic to suit your "pull yourself up by the bootstraps worldview". You also make far too many unsubstantiated claims that clearly stem from a lack of intimate engagement with reality. Take a step away from Fox news for a moment man. Corporate greed and artificial inflation has made it so that no matter how high wages increase, even if there was government intervention to force a minimum wage increase, the baseline would always be significantly less than what is really livable for the vast majority of people. Most UBI proposals are roughly $2500 a month, which in states like California is just enough to pay rent in a small apartment. I have no data to back this up, but I don't imagine most people are comfortable with just the bare necessities. You act like we would be paying so that people can be lazy and live a life of luxury, when its really just paying for a bottom line. More people not having to struggle to pay for very basic needs, means more people that can reasonably pursue higher educations and put more focus honing in on creating a quality home environment for the next generation. The Chicago projects is a horrible analogy also. Let's not pretend like there isn't a long history of bullshit that those communities have had to deal with over the decades. They have had to deal with complete erosion of mental health and the family structures that are necessary to produce the kind of people that can properly function in a society. The breakdown of these communities is largely due to drug abuse (a coping mechanism used to escape their harsh environment) and drug trafficking(a means used by people who have historically been given minimal means of economic development). They are exactly the kind of people who need the kind of alleviation from financial pressures that we are talking about here. No people are not "naturally lazy", on what basis can you honestly look at the vast history of mankind and deduce such a stupid conclusion. People are unmotivated to do things they have no interest in, thus when forced into circumstances in which they must constantly engage in things they can't put their soul into, the products they produce are obviously going to be soulless. People have to do these things they hate because they lack the finances to do anything else. I'm completely open discussion on this topic, and I know for a fact that there are angles on this subject that I am not considering. This is a complex topic that requires intelligent conversation to work through. Please learn to have some nuance in your discourse.
I’d pump the brakes on calling other people stupid when your view of economics is as stupid as « welfare and women are the cause of wage stagnation ». What’s your education on the subject? The internet? Maybe keep quiet then and read more papers instead of opinion pieces.
Nobody said that it is a "surprising discovery" that people spend more time on leisure with UBI, and this is a disingenuous take of the video. The surprising finding, that is underreported in media, is that people who got UBI made less money overall, and their net worth dropped, significantly more than the group that didn't get UBI. This suggests that UBI has a net negative impact on your earnings and wealth. This is a surprising finding, and should be reported. As should people's increase in leisure and enjoyment be reported. They should all be accounted for in the whole picture, yet for some reason, the former finding is ignored.
@@goldenhate6649 The people who propose UBI are not being deceptive or stupid. It is a system intentionally thought of as something to be put in place when humans simply are not needed (At least in any noticeable quantity) to ''run the system''. No, people do not ''need to earn their way'', that need is simply a consequence of how humans run society.
Frankly I think the presumption that everybody who gets the UBI will use it like an economist thinks best is both high handed and short sighted. They’ve made an economic decision that their leisure is more important than their long term financial stability. Why? Because that is what they think they see wealthy people do. UBI with out a reasonable and clear path to done “next level” is meaningless to most people.
The point is not that leisure time for poor people is bad. It is that yhe predicted outcome of the experiment didn’t happen. In science, that means either the model of human behavior we have is bad, or the study is flawed. It doesn't matter that we would all like more cash or that we would like to give more to the poor. The study doesn't say the motives are wrong. The results just question the method for achieving the desired outcome. And making sure you method actually works it the difference between wanting to help and actually helping. I agree that the pandemic makes the results questionable. But it suggests that UBI might have problems during economic crisis. This should be investigated more before it is implemented.
What predicted outcome? The expectation of having more net worth or assets is only in Pete's head, he's the one who believes that it's the only end point. The study didn't have it. It was just one of the things that it measured. Many of the more generally expected outcomes actually happened: more leisure time, better standard of living, better mental and physical health, etc.
@vfwh I have listened to a bunch of talks on UBI and they all suggested it would be a financial gain for the recipients that would lift them out of poverty. So, I think it's fair to say this was a predicted outcome. But you are right that they also predict a better life. And more time to spend with family or to just rest is a definite benefit to the less wealthy. I was once very poor (not just not as wealthy) and I was working three to four jobs at once. More rest would have been welcome. I was also getting an education so I could lift my family out of this situation. That that last part didn't work in the UBI study worries me. But again think the pandemic is a big confounding factor.
@@raymondlines5404 You're right about the education thing, and I agree that it's a disappointment. Regarding "lifting people out of poverty", do you really think that having $1k more after three years in assets, while you're getting $950 less in monthly income, is a net financial gain? I find that view completely idiotic. What I'm reacting to here and in Pete's video is two things: - this kind of literally reactionary impulse that he definitely lets loose that poor people spending more time and resource on leisure is, frankly the way he says it, almost disgusting. I find that kind of moral outrage repulsive, and I think I'm over indexing. - second, the idea that UBI failed because basically, people who had $1k per month extra for 3 years (and in a real UBI situation, this would be indefinite for life) somehow fucked up because they cared less about $1k after three years compared to people who were only getting $50. This is Pete's main (and practically only) point. The only logical conclusion from this point is that given a deal where you get $1k a month for life, but have $1k less in assets after three years, vs. getting $50 every month, working more and having generally worse outcomes all-round, all of it to boast having $1k in the bank more after three years, you'd be better off turning down the $1k a month and take the $50 deal? How completely fucked up is this worldview? Both financially and morally?
As a person very interested in UBI and having read a fair bit about it, I had to view this video because the title was so much at variance with everything that I know about UBI. I also work with persons living in poverty and know how important every dollar is to them, and how they go without many of the things that people in the middle class take for granted. The fact that the subjects who spent their money on leisure or on their teeth - things that most of us take for granted - was likely that they wanted to enjoy the qualify of life that the rest of us do. Someone with better teeth and less oral pain is likely much happier than before, even though this might not show up as “wealth”. And did the people who work 1.4 hours less a week have one job or two? Several studies have shown that people who receive UBI are more likely to: raise their educational level, seek to become entrepreneurs, spend more time raising their children, etc. I’ll have a read of the study to find out exactly what it says, but this video did not convince me that UBI was wasteful or harmful. There is a very real danger that this study will serve to arm people who believe that being poor is a moral failing and that nothing we do will help them.
This study did take place during Covid-19, so choosing not to work more could be a way to lessen the chance of interacting with some with covid-19 and catching it
@@shiftyjedi3417 I'm not sure I understand your comment. UBI is meant to improve people's welfare by providing a basic income. Persons with special needs (e.g., living with autism) would still require additional financial assistance.
So, UBI made people about $1500 dollars poorer than the control, which is almost ideal to the amount actually given to the control, meaning that UBI of $12,000 makes you exactly as wealthy as you would be without any assistance, but means you can spend more time and money on leisure and personal enrichment. Isn’t that exactly what UBI is meant to do? Not make people richer, but maintain or improve their lifestyle even when receiving less money from work?
@@kittysplode "Drive to be productive members of society" is a very kind way of saying "extorting people to accept subpar work conditions under threat of starvation".
@@stefangadshijew1682accepting subpar work under threat of starvation is the human condition - really, the condition of *every* living thing. It's not extortion. It's the life all life is selected for.
yeah this isn't some investment plan, you're paying off the inherent mental health and toil you'd have to sell off normally not to grow, but to survive i fantasise about a world where my 'unproductive' neighbours can eat from the taxes i pay to the state instead of it going to more expensive tech for the military, not hoping they can become 10x coders and build bridges necessarily, but because they feel hunger saying it 'doesn't work' is just saying you put exactly $0 on a human's well-being, seeing as a simple liberal economic analysis would see these people as more productive if they didn't accept the money, didn't work, and just starved
On someone else’s dime. It must always be remembered that government has no money: it only has what it takes from us with force. Those who are paying have their own hellish churn…
@@Kitkat-986 Suppose you get $50K a year, and spend $10K on the various maintenance costs of your house. Also suppose your neighbor earns $60K a year and rents an identical house for $20K. Should your neighbor pay more tax than you? And if the answer is "no", on what basis should tax be collected that makes his tax bill equal to or less than yours?
@@Felale The neighbor has essentially the same house, and after paying housing costs, the same income. On paper he earns more, but in reality he is no better off.
Dunno, if you can afford to drop your second job and finally have time for your kids or just to de-stress "more leasure time" seems like an absolute win in my book. Also: how did they calculate net worth? If the 36k guys invested in a car for example, they prob now also have higher insurance costs. It's not like you can expect them to invest the money into stocks when they have been needing a new washing machine, phone, etc. or repairs in the house for years maybe. Or it went into paying off dept, who knows from just networth? This single measure that's so important apparently. How are you gonna measure the value of a doctor visit? I would much prefer no toothache than having a higher networth. Or how do you measure being able to pay for insuline? Networth just aint the right measure to look at. Btw. except for the paying off depts, the economy profits from those small investments like cars, washing machines, etc. no?
> "Dunno, if you can afford to drop your second job and finally have time for your kids or just to de-stress "more leasure time" seems like an absolute win in my book." Except we know for sure that that's not what happened, because the recipients spent no more time with their families than did the control group. > "Or it went into paying off dept, who knows from just networth?" First: debt is subtracted from assets to calculate your net worth, so paying off debt increases your net worth by a like amount. So that's not it. Second: the recipients just straightforwardly spent more money and took on more debt than the controls. The thing to understand is that this is not just some weird bookkeeping trick. Receiving the money caused participants to work less, to live beyond their means and to make worse financial decisions, in a way that reduced their wealth by more than the free money increased it. It made them poorer, in the true sense of that word. > "How are you gonna measure the value of a doctor visit?" By checking the standard sorts of variables that are looked at in studies like this to aggregate a person's state of health. Though the recipients went to the doctor more than the controls, this did not thereby improve their health outcomes in any way - a familiar result from RCTs that measure the effect of health spending on health outcomes. > "Or how do you measure being able to pay for insuline?" [sic] That's the easiest thing in the world for a study like this to pick up on, because the diabetic who doesn't get insulin just dies.
C.H. Douglas dividend is better from all perspectives because: -tied to economic activity so it can go up and down however the more technology uses an economy the more the dividend will rise. -not funded from taxes. -debt free since it compensates incomes with prices along another mechanism. -antinflationary for being indexed to productivity. -democratical because it spreads over the entire population the acquisitive power. -the artificial advantage of lower prices of products coming from low income countries is reduced since people have access to a broder range of consumer products and are able to cover the cost of salaries in their own countries. -it must be applied with the compensated price mechanism also proposed by C.H. Douglas
@@OptimalOwl We know none of these things for sure, because the actual study isn't even linked here, and studies done elsewhere at other times on the same subject that do have links to the study, show quite the opposite of what you're saying.
@@thelelanatorlol3978 > "We know none of these things for sure, because the actual study isn't even linked here" This is a mild inconvenience, not an insurmountable obstacle. I found a non-paywalled copy in less than 10 minutes with my regular search engine. You can do it in half that time with Sci-Hub. > "[other tdies] show quite the opposite of what you're saying." That's not actually true though, is it? To repeat and sum up the claims I made: 1) recipients lived beyond their means and went into debt 2) recipients spent no more time with their families 3) recipients spent more on healthcare, but this did not improve their health outcomes There are basic income RCTs that find various things, but unless I'm missing something, none of them have anything to say about 1) or 2). As for 3), as I said, this is just completely 100% in line with earlier results of health spending RCTs. When you pay for people in the First World to have more healthcare, this makes them actually have more healthcare (more doctor's visits, more treatments, more medications, all the rest of it, exactly as you'd expect,) but this does not improve their health outcomes.
Trying to make people earn more by giving them free money is a really weird angle for UBI. Isn't the whole point of UBI that as automation devalues labor, we need to support the people who can no longer produce enough value to support a decent lifestyle?
Reasons why dividend proposed in Social Credit is a better idea. C.H. Douglas's dividend concept presents several compelling arguments for its implementation. Here’s a summary of the key points outlining its advantages: ### Moral Justification - **Equitable Distribution**: The dividend acknowledges the contributions of previous generations and human inventions, ensuring that everyone benefits from societal advancements. ### Economic Ties - **Linked to Economic Activity**: The dividend adjusts with economic fluctuations, potentially increasing as technology enhances productivity. This adaptability can lead to more substantial dividends over time it as well may drop if not enough productivity is achieved. ### Funding Mechanism - **Not Tax-Funded**: Unlike traditional welfare programs, the dividend is not reliant on taxes, which can alleviate concerns about fiscal sustainability and government dependency. ### Debt-Free Structure - **Compensation Mechanism**: By balancing incomes with prices, the dividend operates without incurring debt, promoting a healthier economic environment. ### Anti-Inflationary Properties - **Indexed to Productivity**: Since the dividend is tied to productivity, it can help stabilize purchasing power and counteract inflationary pressures. ### Democratic Distribution - **Universal Benefit**: The dividend is distributed across the entire population, enhancing collective purchasing power and fostering economic equality. ### Addressing Global Disparities - **Mitigating Low-Cost Advantages**: By providing broader access to consumer products, the dividend helps level the playing field against the artificial advantages of low prices from lower-income countries. ### Complementary Mechanism - **Compensated Price Mechanism**: For optimal effectiveness, the dividend should be paired with Douglas's compensated price mechanism, ensuring that prices reflect true costs while maintaining economic balance. ### Conclusion Overall, C.H. Douglas's dividend model promotes social equity, economic stability, and a more democratic distribution of wealth, making it a potentially transformative approach to modern economic challenges.
farming still uses tons of cheap labor, often with harsh working conditions due to lax safety regulations, automation hasn't eliminated the need for a large labor force.
This is highly misleading. Farming used to employ large number of workers and support entire communities. Now the work is casual, seasonal, and cannot support any stable communities, leading to a collapse of rural populations, depopulation of many areas (and/or replacement by holiday homes/second homes, which do not support the local economy.
@@exiled_londoner You are bemoaning the fact that people have a better option now than to farm? You want a single industry like farming to support a community? That shouldn't be something you should be advocating for. Rather advocate for other jobs to enter those communities
@@azraeldemuirgos9518 - I wasn't 'bemoaning' anything but merely pointing out a factual reality. However, if you believe that rural communities should have some economic viability and security, that people should not be forced into towns to find work and/or housing, and that food production should be environmentally sustainable AND should provide food that people actually need instead of what produces the greatest profit for the middlemen, then changing the entire rural/agricultural economy is essential. At present the rich countries are destroying their own countryside with intensive farming, wholly unsustainable, high-input production methods, and practices which degrade soil quality (and therefore future productivity), while also imposing similarly unsustainable and damaging practices on agricultural communities in poorer countries. A combination of inappropriate and unsustainable farming practices AND degradation of agricultural land and productivity due to Global Warming will drastically reduce food production and rural sustainability in the coming decades, and this is entirely foreseeable, yet virtually nothing effective is being don to avert this disaster, or even to ameliorate its effects. The plight of young people in rural England, Wales, or Scotland, who will be unable to find work or afford housing in their home villages, and forced to move away to larger towns, is a gross injustice, but it pales into relative insignificance when compared to the famine, mass displacement of populations, and social and economic collapse that will be (already is being) inflicted on hundreds of millions of people in poorer countries. And the chaos and disruption and violence this will bring will cause the refugee flows to richer countries in Europe and North America to increase exponentially, with all the associated strife and trauma and the rise of fascistic xenophobia that we already see in our politics. I would say that horrific scenario (which is already well-advanced) justifies a bit of 'bemoaning'.
Counterpoint: @ 13:44, the sentences following the highlighted text say that what increased the most, relatively from baseline, was gifts to friends and kin. If friends & kin also had UBI, that wouldn't be the case, perhaps allowing redirecting of assets after the basics, including dental care (hardly trivial), and leisure. As your note above suggests, this project didn't test the "universal" in UBI.
And here i was thinking that UBI was one of the proposed "stop gap measures" to address the ever more likely potential scenario of mass technological job displacement. Imagine my surprise finding out it's actually a financial product that's all about "productivity" and "credit worthy consumers".
We have a similar situation in Brazil. It's not UBI, but its something close, where the government pays the poorer families to keep their children at school. In the month of august, we found out that a good portion of this money was being used in online casinos. Instead of people using it for food, education or whatever, it was gambled away
Did you actually find that out or is it like the time the right wing government in Brazil stacked fraudulent evidence against Lula as they kept him in jail so he couldn't run for president because he was going to smash bolsanaro?
I used to work in private equity and one of our investments was in a casino chain. Best day of the month typically was welfare day (revenue was 100% in the Benelux, for your information). Gambling is a dirty business. I call gambling/lotteries a tax on people who are bad at statistics (negative Net Present Value propositions)
There is so much these studies can never capture. Long term people who grow up in a society where UBI is normal can have a vastly different mindset than people who grew up with jobs being necessary. There us a massive difference in some people receiving the money and everyone receiving it. This is also different from negative income tax where only the people in need get it, which at slightly higher administrative cost is much more efficient.
Ubi and a negative income tax are exactly equivalent. It's a negative marginal income tax, so it works as a tax credit for higher income people. It's like if the standard deduction was refundable.
Usually they are not the same. UBI is meant to be the same for everyone to minimise any administrative burden. As such it has massive impact on the entire economy and I have my doubts that it could even be made to work properly. Meanwhile what is usually meant by negative income tax is progressive, meant only for low income people. If your income is zero, you get full amount paid out as a handout, no questions asked. Once you admit to higher income, it goes down in a simple mathematical rule checked by algorithms, so that earning more will always get you more money, even as the handout decreases. The idea is, that a lot of people would get a little, a few would get a lot, and most would get none. Still low-ish maintenance, trying to minimise perverse incentives to not work and split homes, but more similar to current wellfare programs than UBI.
It is mathematically the same. If you tax a high earner $1000 extra and give her $1000 UBI, that is the same thing as taxing her $1000 less and not giving out the UBI. Given any UBI payment scheme, we can come up with a negative income tax rate and deduction amount that produces the same distribution of total income.
How is this counterintuitive? People have a natural balance where more effort is not worth marginal increases in comfort. In poorer societies that equilibrium is heavily balanced to seek more comfort but in a well off nation it is far more likely it is already at or above the point where equilibrium is found with less effort to achieve their currently acceptable level of effort. Is marginal utility not discussed in economics any longer?
It's very counterintuitive. If what you are saying is true, then the prediction is UBI people would have similar net worths to non UBI, or perhaps slightly higher. If they have lower, it's devastating.
I **did not need a study** to know this. All UBI does is raise the income *floor.* This is PATENTLY OBVIOUS to anyone with basic math skills. Anyone who believes UBI is meant to HELP is absolutely insane, because the people in charge KNOW what the results will be.
@@closerintime That is exactly correct. That's why the best analogy we have is an increase in minimum wage--which, as we all damn well know, never matters even slightly except in that it lowers the real wages of anyone who has a non-minimum-wage job.
I agree. UBI will never work in a monetary system where the government can add to the money supply whenever it wants to. UBI can only work in a closed system where there is a finite supply of money. In an open system, if every citizen is given a base amount of money to live on, this will cause inflation and the rise in costs of goods. The income will be inflated away.
Regarding the Liberian village pooling their money into lump sums, people likely wouldn't do exactly the same in the US, because the developed world's solution to that problem is loans.
I know this is a nitpick, but it was technically the Roman Republic while Julius was in charge. It became the Roman Empire after his nephew Octavius assumed titles after defeating Cleopatra and Marc Anthony. Again, it's just me nitpicking
If there were "so many different things in this study that it was basically impossible not to be able to spin the results of this study in a way to make UBI look favorable", then the opposite is also true that it was basically impossible not to be able to spin the results of this study in a way to make UBI look unfavorable. In short, the results were inconclusive since they could have been interpreted however the researchers wanted. The one thing I was unable to determine was who paid for the study? I see that OpenResearch appears to be a spinoff of OpenAI and this is the only study they have done.
Mostly, I would argue though that this does pretty conclusively shut the door on the notion that if you give people UBI that they'll stop working. $1k a month is a lot of money and for them to still work nearly as much suggests that you can give a lot of UBI before it has any impact on people's willingness to work. The pandemic stimulus checks are probably a better set of reports to base future policy on as those went out to nearly everybody and on the whole were spent reasonably.
@MrGrumblier Your point that measuring a multitude of things gives some room for positive and negative spin has some truth to it. For example, digging into auxilliary data to discover a 10% increase in dental visits, which is barely above the noise level. However, Pete didn't focus in some obscure and relatively meaningless statistic buried deep in the data in order to spin it - becoming poorer compared to the control group despite $35K of extra income is a first order and extremely salient effect which cannot be brushed aside as "spin". That's a pretty central result. So I would not summarize that as "inconclusive". I believe that OpenAI created and funded OpenResearch to conduct research like this, as relevant to their business interests.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade First, who posed the hypothesis that $12K/year for 3 years would cause a substantial portion of the recipients to stop working entirely? That sounds like a strawman hypothesis which this research was not designed to answer. Increasing or decreasing work hours would be more relevant, but not central. Creating more or less household wealth would be a central outcome. But if you gave them $60K/yr, the effect on employment might be a very different story. I don't see how you can conclude that a short term small subsidy not having much of some effect, implies that a long term large subsidy would also not have much of that effect. The biggest common problem among UBI research is that people can be expected to behave differently if they know that a subsidy is going to be withdrawn in 1-3 years, after which you will need to earn all of what you spend again. For example, if you give up a job (if the subsidy is enough), it may be hard to get it back later when the experiment ends. If participants can expect to receive multi-decadal UBI, that might have very different outcomes. This short term focus applies to almost every study so far, and very much so to the Pandemic relief (which also has many other huge confounding factors!). But the size of the subsidy would also be expected to have a non-linear effect. Would you quit your job if you were guaranteed 12K/year for life (assume inflation adjustment)? What about 60K? $90K? I would predict that a $60K/yr UBI would have much more than 5x the effect on willingness to work than a $12K, simply because it passes some thresholds where the balance shifts. I am interested in exploring UBI for much the same reasons that Pete gives at the beginning of this video, but I am not willing to support a nationwide UBI until there is solid research; good intentions too often have undesired results. If UBI can be seriously shown to produce good results, I could full heartedly support it. I'd like to see a study of a everyone already living in a county, say (ie: mixture of town and country) receiving a meaningful UBI for 20 years, guaranteed from the start (ie: funding pre-allocated and not revokable). Of course, it could be studied during that time, and would not need to wait for final outcomes - the long term guarantee in itself would affect even shorter term outcomes in ways that short term payouts would not. This could have both positive and negative effects compared to short term experiments, some of which could take years to develop, culturally or personally. (It would be interesting to also study what happens if the UBI is reduced or eliminated after such a long period, which could be required of a nationwide UBI in a major economic downturn some time in the future - how many people would be able to manage such a transition?) Of course that would be very expensive - but a drop in the bucket compared to creating a UBI program for the entire country. Despite the downsides noted in this video, I think that UBI deserves a larger and longer term study (well, several of them).
Even worse, Open Research Labs is Y Combinator. Think Stripe, Coinbase, DoorDash, Airbnb, Instacart, DropBox, Twitch. If BiLliOnAiReS sAy UBI iS bAd, iT mUsT bE tRuE! 😂
@@jhpjhunofc it will take our jobs. New jobs are not created but old jobs are replaced by machines. Our population is stagnating. Only reason the same didn't happen during the industrial revolution, is because of the population increasing fast.
@@jhpjhun While it is true that not all jobs can be automated, "we will always create new industries" seems like wishful thinking and pretty illogical. But even if I give you that, the short term consequences for the people that are affected can be catastrophic. Why should those people be happy that in 50 years, the decendants of their betters will struggle in new, creative ways to exploit and waste human life?
@@paro2210 Small nitpick, but in fact new jobs will be created as machines replace jobs. As people are still needed to upkeep or maintain the machines. If they are maintained by other machines, then those machines need to be maintained. McDonalds will be hiring robotics engineers.
COVID did EXACTLY this in Chile!!!! When the restrictions started being lifted, businesses (commerce, restaurants, etc) struggled to hire people. The people didn't want to work! Instead, by receiving the payments (government transfers + their own pension funds but before retirement), they started to buy cars, TVs, and random stuff. But they did not want to work NOR save money.
I have been a forensic Psych for 23, going on 24 years. This doesn't surprise me a bit. It would have when I was a young student but it doesn't now. Some people are motivated and eager to work for their future, delay that gratification for years to ultimately get ahead. Others simply aren't. I think, the people that are educated, active in school and want to make their, and other's lives better are the motivated type and have a hard time realizing there are lots of people that are perfectly happy to scrape by doing the absolute minimum. Some will kinda be forced to work to prevent becoming homeless and find that they do have more control over their lives than they realize. Those will climb out of poverty themselves. Those that are not future oriented and don't want to do anything above the minimum are not going to change if you simply give them $1,000 a month. They aren't going to use that money to go to school. They aren't going to invest that money for the future. No, they will go for short term gratification. Some will cut back their work hours and party more, that's counter productive. Some will buy nicer cloths, eat out more, maybe buy a car but it won't be to get to work, it will be to impress others. That may make their life a little better but it won't get them out of poverty. In extremely poor countries, that may be different but, in developed western countries, as tough as it may seem sometimes, those that are motivated, will generally do well long term. Those that aren't motivated will not become motivated even if it's made easier for them.
I don't think you have any clue what proportion of people will behave in what ways. I know that personally I've achieved my most productive output when left alone for large periods of time, e.g. learning to code, writing applications, making and releasing music, and that I coast by and do the bare minimum in school and work environments because they're reliably unstimulating. If I had a way to reduce my hours at a job I feel contributes nothing to the world and steals my life life away, then I'd absolutely take advantage of it, and whenever I get those sorts of opportunities I use that time on productive, creative endeavors that are valuable to me.
@@johncasey9544 See, you are self motivated. You are kinda making my point for me. You are simply optimizing your time. Some people are perfectly happy doing virtually nothing productive. Productive doesn't necessarily mean a job only.
More importantly, why do you expect that turning the ENTIRE POPULATION into trust fund kids will result in the outcome you want? And where do you expect that money to come from?
@@thomaskalbfus2005 The Roman Empire started with Octavian/Octavius/Augustus. Trying to conflate the Empire with a figurative use of the word 'empire' just makes you look ignorant and silly.
Maybe they we're overworked with no time off. They have no assets or liabilities. No time off,vacation or holiday pay for decades.Maybe child care, stay home to watch kids. Somethings are more important than money. Are they home owners or renters.
@@Apjooz it's a bit more significant than the difference between a Republic and a Democracy, which is always brought up when someone talks about the US being a Democracy. Do you push back to those comments?
@@ctrlaltdebug Back then republic and demoncracy were the same thing, one word is latin and the other greek and today they are not mutually exclusive which is why the people who claim US is a republic and not a democracy are the apex of ignorance. Also just cause it was called the roman republic doesn't mean it still was, just how north korea calles itself "democratic republic" right now
@@becausecontextmatters5260 No. Under Greek democracy, the eligible citizens voted directly for policies. In the Roman republic, the citizens voted for public officials who carried out policy, and only directly voted on certain important issues. The US founding fathers explicitly based the constitution on Rome for checks and balances against mob rule. Julius Caesar was around for the civil war that ended the Roman Republic, but he was assassinated precisely because he was behaving like a monarch. His successor Augustus was the first emperor.
@@ctrlaltdebugJulius Caesar made himself dictator perpetuo, which is basically an emperor without calling himself an emperor. So just like in north korea as i mentioned, when you have a dictator for life, you're no longer a republic. Also you're just regurgitating propaganda and you have no clue what the word "explicitly" means as pretty much everything you say is demonstrably false. They drew upon philosophical ideals that were both common in greek and roman world but there was no distinction between republic and democracy at the time, pointing to organization is as silly as saying that any country who doesn't elect presidents through electoral college is not a republic. And rome had some norms but not a constitution that prevented "mob rule", whatever that is, cause i can bet real money you don't know either but keep repeating it like a parrot. Also constitution can be changed by a big enough mob so your argument is double dumb.
This is a very predictable result when you understand the people you are studying. The proponents of UBI tend to be financially literate people who aren't considering the financial literacy of the people who will be receiving the money. The reality is that some people might see the opportunity and improve their situation, but most will take the money and become dependent on it.
More than that, they have very little understanding of second order effects. Humans react to incentives, and if you incentivize not working people won’t work. This idea that we are all productive members of society by nature is a huge fallacy
Which is completely wrong. If 1.4 hours a week less work constitutes dependency for 1,000 a week worth of income, then something very strange is going on. $1k a week is more than I was making at my last job, but these people are only cutting back by less than 2 hours and that's evidence of dependency? The UBI has never depended on financial literacy of the recipients as part of the theory. People who earn a living wage aren't necessarily financially literate beyond being able to find work that allows them to pay the bills. They simply hire an expert or go to their financial institution and get advice there. If neither of those is the case, then they get books. People on a UBI are in more or less the same boat, they just don't necessarily have a job that pays all the bills. Videos like this that are so completely wrong do nothing helpful in terms of advancing the progress towards a workable solution.
Well for us poor financially literate people it would help. How about a test? We pass it? We get cash. You fail it? You get referred to whatever hold your hand social security BS that exist for idiots that need it.
The obvious problem with this take is that UBI has shown positive results in other studies in less well-off countries (and a couple of developed ones, actually). For financial literacy to be the issue, you have to argue that people in the US are uniquely financially illiterate in a way that people from, say, Finland or Namibia aren't.
Dependancy isn't a bad thing, necessarily. I think it's important to understand that we've already been running the most successful BI campaigns in history for over 60 years. Social Security, Medicaid, and things like VA disability are all fundamentally the same concept as UBI, they just aren't "universal".
Wouldn't UBI just increase wealth disparity? If the lower income group get lifted to the middle, then they all have the same amount of money competing for a similar basket of goods. Wouldn't this just increase the value of assets and make every basic good more expensive?
Reasons why dividend proposed in Social Credit is a better idea. C.H. Douglas's dividend concept presents several compelling arguments for its implementation. Here’s a summary of the key points outlining its advantages: ### Moral Justification - **Equitable Distribution**: The dividend acknowledges the contributions of previous generations and human inventions, ensuring that everyone benefits from societal advancements. ### Economic Ties - **Linked to Economic Activity**: The dividend adjusts with economic fluctuations, potentially increasing as technology enhances productivity. This adaptability can lead to more substantial dividends over time it as well may drop if not enough productivity is achieved. ### Funding Mechanism - **Not Tax-Funded**: Unlike traditional welfare programs, the dividend is not reliant on taxes, which can alleviate concerns about fiscal sustainability and government dependency. ### Debt-Free Structure - **Compensation Mechanism**: By balancing incomes with prices, the dividend operates without incurring debt, promoting a healthier economic environment. ### Anti-Inflationary Properties - **Indexed to Productivity**: Since the dividend is tied to productivity, it can help stabilize purchasing power and counteract inflationary pressures. ### Democratic Distribution - **Universal Benefit**: The dividend is distributed across the entire population, enhancing collective purchasing power and fostering economic equality. ### Addressing Global Disparities - **Mitigating Low-Cost Advantages**: By providing broader access to consumer products, the dividend helps level the playing field against the artificial advantages of low prices from lower-income countries. ### Complementary Mechanism - **Compensated Price Mechanism**: For optimal effectiveness, the dividend should be paired with Douglas's compensated price mechanism, ensuring that prices reflect true costs while maintaining economic balance. ### Conclusion Overall, C.H. Douglas's dividend model promotes social equity, economic stability, and a more democratic distribution of wealth, making it a potentially transformative approach to modern economic challenges.
I appreciate the idea of lump sum version of UBI, which I hadn't heard before. If it had to happen at all, I suppose that method would be the one I would support. However, the primary reason I see UBI not solving any problems beyond the short term cannot be reflected in any of these studies. In all cases the rest of the state/country was NOT getting the UBI. This gave participants a relative advantage WITHOUT leading to inflation. If even at the state level this was implemented it would be eaten up by inflation within a few short years. So do we just keep increase the UBI amount to the point that inflation is so high that the only way anyone can support themselves is if they stay in the good graces of the government and don't get their UBI withheld for 'wrongthink?' This is a recipe for tyranny.
The inflation argument is wrong in principle. Inflation is caused by a mismatch between productive capacity and the money supply so if less people can do more, say with the help of AI then that should not only not be inflationary but your problem then becomes lack of people with money to spend. The debanking angle is worrying.
Printing money to pay people to not work is a recipe for inflation, not to mention, as you said, the possibility for abuse by the government. Self sufficient people are more resistant to government tyrrany, and no one is less self sufficient than someone who is paid by the state to not work.
@@markcarey67 I would argue that inflation is caused less by having fewer workers than money in circulation going toward wages than by simply having more money in circulation, regardless of whether the people get it by working or by handouts. You're simply able to use that 'productive capacity' shorthand now because working is currently the only way enough people get access to the money supply to have an effect on inflation!
It wouldn't lead to inflation because the driver of inflation is not the availability of money to the poorest but the effort by the richest to re-capture that money, which leads to both increased inequality and money-hoarding at the top. When those re-capture efforts are negatively reinforced by a progressive income and wealth tax that just transfers it right back to the poorest inflation simply doesn't occur. But yes, if you just print money without a progressive tax then you get inflation.
Inflation is often caused by rising wages, but if we live in a post-worker economy, where most jobs are offshored or automated by machines or AI, then inflation wont be such a problem.
I agree with this. I went from broke and in debt to having way more money than ever before by adjusting my behaviors. Poverty is a behavioral issue, not an issue of economic system.
@@r.e.4873Poverty is not a behavioural issue when people are at the whims of their environment. Yes, even you. Some people aren't socialised as children, and this immediately sets them up for failure. They may or may not be abused, and are unlikely to have friendships, or even better able to form them. On the other hand, others are socialised, grow up in happy households, and even if they don't have that part they at least have friends, or at least have the personality to be a sycophantic hand-wringer. We haven't even discussed neurodivergence yet. If mental illness is not the fault of the person, why is someone who doesn't have a support network, and is unable to obtain one because it requires community, denigrated for having been unable to improve their position alone? Some of the hardest workers, people much more hardworking than you, and much stronger than you, end up homeless. The tired line of ‘it is up to you to help yourself, no one else can’ is actually incorrect. For example, how does one cure loneliness? It inherently requires other people to consent to forming a genuine connection to you. This requires other people. How does one get a job? It requires somebody else to like your face, personality, and pick you even when you're most likely not the most qualified to apply. This requires the discretion of other people, and no matter what you do for your CV, you are beholden to the whims of employers. And what about an agoraphobic? All the success stories to that involve a trusted person sacrificing much of their own life to be with them through it, how does that come about? There is no such thing as a self-made man, you were dependent on everyone who chose to validate your actions. This is an immediate disadvantage for anyone who isn't a psychopath, and for anyone who is simply ‘weird’ in a more benevolent way. Lazy people are very rare. Most people you would call that are mentally ill. Or, in most cases, you recognise that you were lazy, and thus you think anyone else in a position that you DON'T understand (let me be clear on that) looks to be in a similar position as to what you were, and thus you conclude that they were just goofing around like yourself. Protip: they most likely weren't, and their life is just harder than yours. And before you rant about some sort of childhood trauma you had, reread what I wrote and understand that it's literally an environmental lottery for whether or not one is given the tools to recover from it. It's not impressive to go from debt to plenty of disposable income if you're a normal person who is capable of making connections and got lucky with mental illness. Like literally just work and look for opportunities, it's pretty simple. Except it doesn't work like that for everyone even when they understand that, because society doesn't work like that, and if you haven't been an agoraphobic, abused, friendless autist in a place with underfunded social services, just for example, you wouldn't know a single bloody thing about getting out of it.
There are "other" stories about Lotto winners where the recipients of multi million dollar lottery wins decide to continue working their jobs until they retire. Most of these people don't particularly love their jobs. Their main reasons for continuing to work are that they would be bored and feel valueless without going to work each week. You don't hear about these winners so much, because it's not considered a particularly "newsworthy" story in our MSM's love affair with bad news all around 24/7.
Denver did a study where they gave homeless people rent money, a year later most of them were still homeless. Denver touted it as a success saying "we saved the city $500,000 on homeless services" but the study cost $10,000,000. A $9.5 million net loss to learn what we all already knew.
Free money will always simply incentivise a significant percentage of people to simply do less. Its human nature. Most people just want to stop, rather than do more especially if they're older. Nothing wrong with that desire but not it's not economically productive to give them that money. The only way I realistically see UBI type schemes working is to give an allowance claimable towards training which is weighted against them individually. They have to pay a certain amount towards it then the system pays the rest to make them invested. And not on anything, it has to be deemed valuable to get it. Anything free always gets abused.
How is it not economically productive to give the poor money? Poor people spend their money in the economy immediately. It is actually tax cuts for the wealthy that are economically unproductive.
@@jamesphillips2285The wealthy use those tax cuts, to invest in business. This leads to better working conditions, wages, and more people being employed. To say tax cuts for the rich, only benefit the rich, is like saying taxing the poor, only hurts the poor.
@@sebastianlucas704 No they don"t. Companies have been doing stock buy-backs instead investing in the business. There have been mass layoffs as interest rates increase. The wealthy are good at extracting money from the economy. They will get their investment money whether you give it to the poor or the rich. However if you give it to the poor: their living conditions will improve.
@@sebastianlucas704 Uh no, that's not what happened LOL. They spent it on stock buybacks. As productivity rose, they laid off people instead of hiring more. As a result, the wealthy got a LOT richer. With all the layoffs in the tech sector, working conditions went to shit, and wages flatlined.
The premise of the study is flawed. The metric shouldn't be happiness but how sustainable your financial situation is. Thing is, you're not gonna have much savings if you're paying for all the things you need to survive. That's kind of the point. Also, some of the metrics measured are silly. I.e: The drug one. It doesn't measure addiction vs leisure. You could be a casual user and still be productive.
I think a UBI needs to be paired with strong insurance mechanisms. Most people are terrible at budgeting and saving for a rainy day, so don't expect them to. Pay them an amount per month that is basically what they should expect to spend that month, but than also have money available in case they hit an unexpected snag and need a bit more.
You're kind of assuming that net worth versus time is still more important here or that if you do something with your time it is only valuable if it makes you richer. Orson Welles made a considerable net loss over his lifetime making films. He made most of his money on the side doing voice acting and spent it all on self financing his film projects. Anyone who is talented at impecunious pursuits could well end up with less net worth on paper under UBI but still better off.
@@theX24968Z why is the health and enjoyment of life not enough reason on its own? how dense can you be, not everything needs to be about maximum efficiency towards getting the most monetary gain
@@chad2687 because both of those things are defined by standards that can be lowered and are easy to manipulate. progress cannot. progress not not consume more resources than it produces, causing others to suffer more than they would otherwise.
We tried UBI in 2020 during the pandemic. We gave people we didn’t let work PPP loans and FPUC payments for the three months minimum. All it did was cause frivolous goods purchased and created the massive inflation. Our way out of it has been to import the second/third world to create growth to compensate.
*lump sum UBI* would just increase the costs of any commodity in high demand from recipients. if companies know a customer can/ willing spend more money for a product: they are icentivised to increase prices. Take colleges for example: student loan debt keeps getting worse no matter how much money we throw at the problem. a permanent, reusable assset, or service would at least leviate or raise the standard of living for the poor. public bathing houses, basic shelter, free health clinics?
In the long run, shouldn't we expect the increased prices to bring in more firms that produce the desired goods, driving the prices down through competition?
@@johncasey9544 No cuz printing money without increased productivity doesn't create new firms. It just devalues the money supply. It makes the poor poorer and inflates the prices of assets and increases borrowing power of the ultra wealthy.
It's extremely fishy that this video doesn't link the paper. The paper seemingly appears in 9:03, but is almost impossible to read the title and search. I wonder, why on earth there's no link to the paper in the description?
Those main takeaways highlighted at 16:40, the ones you considered secondary outcomes, were so much more interesting than everything you focused on. People on UBI spent more on essentials and healthcare, had more time to actually enjoy their lives and gifted/donated what they had left over! That tracks with the other successful studies in developing nations, but the key difference is the society we live in. Those who received UBI cared less about building their own wealth because they knew they could meet their needs. Why work more when you know you have enough? UBI doesnt feed capitalism
UBI feeds capitalism. More or less every dollar handed to those people wound up being spent on something, hence the lack of growth in their wealth. That money then was able to circulate in the economy spurring growth. The amount being handed out was neither enough per month nor long enough to expect to see much of anything. That's especially the case given that it was like 500 people in TX and 500 in IL that got the full money. A longer study might have addressed what happens once the backlog of expenses is worked through.
To be fair I like the idea of UBI and even though I wouldn't mind having the money I wasn't totally convinced it was gonna work. I would much rather have Universal Healthcare than UBI.
The problem is simple: researches wanted UBI to "motivate" people to earn more and be more productive But people wanted to live happier and healthier life
> "But people wanted to live happier and healthier life" "Healthier" is straightforwardly wrong. "Happier" is extremely debatable. The recipients spent more on healthcare, but their health outcomes did not improve. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, because all the RCTs on healthcare spending show that paying for people to use more healthcare causes them to use more healthcare, but does not improve their health. The recipients also just spent a lot more money in general. So much so, in fact, that they accrued more debt, and ended up with $3k less in net wealth than the non-recipients. Most of that extra spending went into spending more than the control group did on food, housing and transportation - as in, they cooked less, ate more fast food, leased somewhat nice cars, and rented somewhat nicer apartments. For all the variables that might hint at living a good and fulfilling life, let alone one with any kind of achievement or ambition, the recipients did no better than the non-recipients. They spent no more time with their families, they completed no more education, they started no more businesses, they wound up with no better health, etc. If your idea of happiness is Pizza And Netflix Maximalism, then okay. Otherwise, no.
@@OptimalOwl while I see where you took data on "their health did not improve", I can't find in the report part about "No family no good food just netflix and junk". What I see is "weekly food expenditures and consumption of fresh vegetables, fish, and meat rise", or moms ow newborns more often eating outside of home (which is good, because moms of newborn babies should use ANY opportunity for rest). As for family there is data that "The category that rises most relative to the baseline level of spending is net gifts to family and friends". And I see exactly no mentions of how much time is spent with families.
@@Storytelless > "I see exactly no mentions of how much time is spent with families." Look at the various graphs on time use, e.g. Figures A1 through A5, on pages 67 to 71. This is also what makes me think they spent more time doing non-productive, non-fulfilling solitary activities like Netflix. Notice how things like working, exercising, self-improvement, community engagement and caring for others are all separated out into their own categories, none of which increased. What does that leave in the "Self Care," "Solitary Leisure" and "Other Activities," which did increase? > "No good food just Netflix." The recipients spent more than non-recipients on food, without spending any more time on chores or hobbies (which is AFAICT where time spent cooking would be categorized.) What could that mean, if not eating out more and ordering more food? I did not mean to imply that the participants all ate trash. I meant pizza as an example of a typical meal you order for delivery or takeaway, not as an example of a typical trash food. The recipients probably did not eat much more trash food than the control group, or else we'd be picking that up in the health outcome measures. > "The category that rises most relative to the baseline level of spending is net gifts to family and friends" On average, of the $1'000 per month, $22 per month went to gifts and to helping people out. IIRC, I think that also included things like donating to church and to charities. I can't locate that $22 figure in the text just now, but I remember reading it in there, and I'm seeing it in the stories reporting on the study as well.
@@destroya3303 how was he wrong? Negative income tax is infinitely more efficient that the byzantine maze of US welfare system, as it uses the IRS bureaucracy that's already in place and is not going anywhere
Negative tax would actually work. If you subsidized more work and more achievement your society will work more and achieve more. If you subsidize laziness, your society will collapse into unbelievable inflation.
If you mean journalists working at large corporations, I think you have to look at their business model to understand if that goal is even realistic. Starbucks is huge because they figured out how to sell coffee to people who don't like coffee, but want to feel sophisticated. The McNews model of your daily politics, entertainment, tech and sports is huge because, fundamentally, it tells people what they want to hear. Most people want to hear that the government can cut people a check and make poverty go away. I think independent creators who are passionate about a subject and funded by patrons can be more reality-based and tell us the good and the bad. But journalism that gets to the truth will probably always be a fairly niche business.
Lol!! Please say you're being facetious. Anyone who assumes "journalists" - whether legitimate or not - have any intention of representing "reality" as it truly is has already thrown away their most fundamental asset of independent and responsible thought and reason. Naiveté is deadly, to both you and others. Journalism as a whole discovered long ago that actually _gaining_ infinite unchecked power was far more personally profitable than _speaking truth to power_ could ever be.
Study Was Biased: No distributions of # children in family -vs- income is one glaring shortcoming. UBI works here: *) Raising 6 children w/high school education *) Can now afford a car - the most coveted thing for the poor *) Can can take a lower paying job that would prefer to have *) Can stay closer to family, rather that relocate to make more money. UBI doesn't work here: *) Well to do, young people would gladly trade work for leisure - if I had 3 months off every year w/o pay, I'd have been a lifer engineer at Pratt & Whitney
It's arguable that using free money to *not work* outside the home during the pandemic was the smartest use of the money; curious if they charted the death/illness rate from COVID among the two groups. I think you can't really judge this study given when it was conducted.
That is true. I kept working through Covid because I was afraid that it would be hard to find a job when everyone went back to work. I was wrong about that.
If you read the followup pinned comment, it was mentioned that "The study also measured this and found no improvements, not even a small improvement in physical health". So whether they tracked COVID-19 death/illness in particular they should still have found it it with what they did track.
One giant flaw in the study: Guaranteed UBI for only 3 years is not a safety net that allows you the freedom to quit your job or the like, because there's no guaranteed income *after* 3 years.
Such a statistic is useless. Individual homeless people would vary immeasurably in the costs they impose on society. A quiet person with mental disabilities who sleeps on park benches and deposits their trash in trash cans is not comparable with a person with a violent scofflaw who constantly commits vandalism, litters everywhere, and threatens the safety of the other citizens. Putting them both into one category is pretty unhelpful.
@@longiusaescius2537how would migrants cost so much more than homeless native homeless people. I mean I assume some of it is for processing. But that shouldn't make that much of a difference.
Thing with AI is that ppl believe it will solve all problems. When in reality, its only good for a few... a very few problems. People used to think we would be living like the jetsons in 2000... tech has come a long way, but its not likely to come so far as to replace us. The jobs we do and how we do them, will change. But we'll still be needed to get them done.
There is a section of the population that can only do manual labor. You can't educate them, it is just how they are. When the robots come, these people are unemployable.
The thing with AI - or any other form of automation, really - is that people believe that it will affect someone else, not them. AI isn't replacing less skilled or repetitive labor, that's already been done for decades. AI is replacing engineers and the like, who are far too bloated and dysfunctional already..
@@barbarakauppi9915 ai is just nerual networks that try to figure out how to best solve a problem using learning but ofc its way oversimplification but in short it's still just a computer program of yes/nos but on a spectrum/scale that can weight an answer towards yes or no and make decisions based on that. So no it will not replace people it is as good as the data you put in it but will automate the more cumbersome tasks that are mind numbingly boring or repetitive.
@@barbarakauppi9915 Of cause it affects everyone. Just like tractors being used affected everyone, via the quality of food produced. My point is AI could never take all the jobs. Its not some be all and end all thing. A lot of people that would have become farm hands, ended up doing desk jobs. The work force is still there, jobs are still needed. But the work changes each time tech grows. Farm hands went from a very physical job to a more technical one. From working in open space, to a small cubical. End of the day, the jobs may be different, but people are still needed to do them :/ I suspect the majority of jobs with shift in skill, as AIs need more power and speed, its likely electricians and builders will be needed to update things, such as laying fiber optic cable... Perhaps programmers will need to learn some 'less skilled or repetitive labour' and help to dig the trenches to lay cables in :P
@@barbarakauppi9915 one of the main jobs that engineers do is replace repetitive labor. if you automate engineers, you automate everything, eventually.
Nonsense, UBI works with or without financial literacy. People can either hire an expert or get advice at their bank/credit union if they don't have the financial literacy. And, it's never been about discipline, there's entire industries setup to make it expensive to be poor. Things like grocery stores and check cashing fees mean that the poor outright have less to work with to begin with.
Yo, what happened? This wasn't the plan, Gave you the tools, thought you'd make a stand. Cash in your hands, time to invest, But you clocked out early, just chasing rest. This wasn't for lounging, for kicking your feet, It was for rising, for making ends meet. Now you're back where you started, maybe worse- Man, this was supposed to break the curse.
@@pctrashtalk2069consumption works, but as long as people are consuming value adding things. If people are consuming VR and pc games all day, then that kind if consumption will ruin the nation. But if people are consuming BMWs, Mercedes, apartments like Switzerland is doing, than that consumption will lead into insane prosperity. But to consume, you need to work.
Maybe I'm just misremembering my Econ courses, but I would think that anytime you give people money without getting something in value in return, inflation is always the result.
I DON'T CARE IF I'M POORER. I want UBI so I can do what I love before I exit this mortal coil. It's like people don't understand anything beyond money, it blows my mind.
I don't think 3 years is enough for this to reach full effect. I think it's like this: People have to settle into their new reality of having that 1000 more. Then, after settling, they will be content for a while. And THEN they start wanting more. Honestly, if I'd know I'd receive 1000 per month for 3 years, I'd not change anything on my life. I'd slowly buy, replace and repair all the things I need to and save the rest for when the 3 years end. Maybe I'd temporarily stop working extra because I temporarily have enough. It's like a mini vacation that has a very clear start and end date, and that in itself already screws over the study. What do people expect to happen? That someone learns they get 1000 more per month (which isn't much, let's face it) and they immediatelly go and put it into some form of education (which can, per location, be a lot more expensive) and at the end of 3 years they have to have finished that education/training or whatever and then find a way to put it to good financial use, when most employers rather not employ a more trained person for a job a less trained person can do? 3 years isn't even a prologue. A very deep change in mindset has to happen before the goal is reached. Try the study over 50 years.
This reminds me of a video that explained how medieval English peasants worked. In short: they only did as much as required to live in reasonable comfort and avoided work as much as possible. What did they do instead? Leisure... after they finished their household chores of course.
They worked so little because if they worked more they would die otherwise. They had to plan and be ready for winter and had save the money they got so they could afford stuff through winter. Winter was the biggest killer of the poor.
They really had no option to increase their financial position. The margins were thin. If you worked twice as many hours you might make 2% more. Whereas in modern society there are opportunities to make 500% more if you work harder.
So if a person doesn't provide "productivity" in a strictly economic way, then they are useless? This guy has no creativity, imagination, or the ability to understand what makes people "humans". Here's a hint: it's not working at a job. Just spun a bad study into how he wanted to see it. That's really pathetic.
C.H. Douglas dividend is better from all perspectives because: -morally right to give people the share from previous generations coming from human inventions for the improvement of human societies. -it is tied to economic activity so it can go up and down however the more technology uses an economy the more the dividend will rise. -not funded from taxes. -debt free since it compensates incomes with prices along another mechanism. -antinflationary for being indexed to productivity. -democratical because it spreads over the entire population the acquisitive power. -the artificial advantage of lower prices of products coming from low income countries is reduced since people have access to a broder range of consumer products and are able to cover the cost of salaries in their own countries. -it must be applied with the compensated price mechanism also proposed by C.H. Douglas
If your neighbour was on UBI, and spent his time painting, going to theater, going to bars, retired mode, would he consider himself useless? no. Is he useful to you?
Listing Friedman's negative income tax plan as a sort of UBI completely misses the point. He wasn't suggesting negative income tax as a form of UBI but rather a replacement for the assortment of social welfare programs already in place. One that didn't disincentivize people to go find work as much as the existing ones do. And as an added benefit it would make minimum wage a moot point so we could get rid of that as well.
What was their quality of life, their happiness? if they are spending more on leisure and less work, were they happier? $1000 worse off does not necessarily mean worse. because a happier person does help in terms of health. This would thus be more interesting to see in a place like UK or Australia where healthcare is less of a problem.
Their leisure time is being funded off the backs of people who are working harder and being taxed more. It's fundamentally immoral to take from someone who works hard to give to someone who doesn't.
And you just demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of UBI, as well as how it would be funded. UBI is universal, it applies to everyone. some of those in the study would have been wealthy and paying more tax than others. in fact, it may be possible some were multimillionaires. UBI does not discriminate based upon your wealth or taxes paid. Next is your lack of understanding of how a UBI is funded. Governments literally make money. A UBI would be funded by the government just producing more money. It is not funded by taxing people more as this defeats the entire purpose of UBI.
@@KateeAngel UBI won't be funded by billionaires. Billionaires are notoriously hard to tax, if it were easy, there wouldn't be any billionaires. Even if the government went to every billionaire and held them at gunpoint for their bank account details, that amount of money simply wouldn't be enough to fund UBI. UBI is a colossal expense. Just a basic 1k per month for every citizen would require over 25% of the entire US economy dedicated just to funding UBI, not counting the administrative and procedural costs, which with government tends to more than double the cost of any program. Practically speaking, to implement just a basic 1k per month UBI would cost the entire current budget of federal government and the entire budget of every state government combined to fund it. About half of the entire current GDP would go to funding UBI. It is economcially completely unfeasible.
I would like to say thay the likelihood of AI replacing everyone in 5 years is very unlikely and extrapolates from a relatively linear increase in its abilities which is likely going to reach a cap, especially when it requires a lot of people to be able to figure out the problems of AI and I requires everyone to agree to it, which they aren't because noone wants the AI to diagnose and treat you with a pneumonia when you could have cancer
Remember when the tractor put everyone out of work in the agrarian society? Yeah, me neither. It will be like every other technology, a force multiplier. More people work in the car industry now than ever despite robots. We just have VASTLY better cars.
@@jasongrundy1717 Nobody knows what will happen. 10 years ago LLMs of today were considered 50 years away. AI benefits from a steady increase in compute available, but sudden algorithmic and training improvements also happen, like GPT o1. I do not like historical comparisons in the case of AI. It's the first technology which can, at least in principle, make its own decisions. That's not a "force multiplier" or a "tool". That's another species. Of course, current systems are bad at long term planning, continuous learning and the like, but there are hundreds if not thousands of people working on these problems.
@KateeAngel Computers are basically like a five year old. If you want it to dobsomething useful, they need a how to guide for dummies to do it. AI is just moves computers to the preteen years. They know just enough to get in trouble without being supervised. But atleast you dont have to break it down barney style at em as much.
10:00 - so, the people with UBI had more time for themselves, and that is somehow bad? And you also expect them to spend money on networking? How? Also, what education can you buy for 1000 USD a month where the study was conducted while also working? Also, how would that paid education be useful? Do you have zero experience with job searching? I am asking these questions as somebody who both studies on one's own (and has a degree) and has been fortunate enough to get a high-paying job after suffering through the job-searching process. 17:00 - the fact that more people get to access necessary healthcare is not significant? What? Are you this deep into net worth worship that you decide to ignore people being able to access basic needs that should be fulfilled as basic human rights?
Is easy people don't have incentive to work so they don't. Have enough people to do this and all collapse. Is common problem in comunist countries with devastating results.
The idea is that if it is successful, there should be an increase in net worth. If you look at this plan long term, if everyone became LESS financially independent and healthy, there is a mess. People end up needing more. This $1000 has to come from ✨somewhere✨ (it comes from people who would be working). If there needed to be an increase, the increase would come from people who work. And so on. Long term, people work because we need those jobs. If there are less and less hours being worked on regular jobs, those industries cease to exist or cease to be able to serve the population (people were upset about their favorite places or services having reduced hours or closing after workplaces were struggling to find people to hire after covid). These jobs will be filled by AI, when possible. Then no one gets to work. Yes, having more personal time and going to the dentist is a positive thing. However it’s disingenuous to present them as if they outweigh the very real negatives of what this would do to everyone. If your concern is “what can you even buy that would be useful (like education) with $1000 in the US??” That’s a great question. Probably not much. How much should they be getting?? $5000 a month? $10,000 a month?? How are we going to be able to afford that? The hope would be that $1000 could give people enough cushion to do things that would make improvements on their socioeconomic position. But it didn’t work, understandably. Because it doesn’t make much sense. So now what?
@@Gromkiii 'Is easy people don't have incentive to work so they don't.' Lol. 'They don't have incentive'. Also, they literally kept working. 'Is common problem in comunist countries with devastating results' HAHAHA. You have no clue about how countries with communist governments worked/work. Communist revolutions, wherever they succeeded, consistently managed to massively improve people's lives. Compare late Russian Empire with the USSR, as well as post-Soviet Russia with the USSR.
@@LiterallyJustAnActualPotato 'The idea is that if it is successful, there should be an increase in net worth' Why? 'This $1000 has to come from ✨somewhere✨ (it comes from people who would be working)' Money circulates in an economic system. It doesn't 'come from people who would be working'. Furthermore, the richest people in the world in general and in the US in specific do not work. They instead earn most of their income through ownership. 'If there needed to be an increase, the increase would come from people who work' Not necessarily. You could also redistribute wealth from the richest people who do not work. In general, you have a very childish perception of economics. I recommend you read something about macroecon.
The point of UBI isn’t to eliminate poverty. The point of UBI is to have a failsafe for society when Ai is competent enough to replace jobs. There’s still layoffs in the tech sector and being replaced with nothing. That’s a lot of high paying jobs gone.
Yes I agree so much. I’m really disappointed in his flagrant disregard for humanity. It’s genuinely dystopian the way he is sad over people being able to have more leisure time.
@@leggysoft Corporate welfare is already legalized by political bribes, lawyers and legislators that cut tax laws for Big Corps. This is why the Fair Tax is what's needed to repeal Amendment 16.
@@leggysoft If there's such a thong as corporate welfare it is due to the bribed welfare recipients in Congress and not the illegal theft of income which is by definition slavery. Negative income tax is UBI. Universal Basic Income and I rather the Fairtax to be law that would repeal and replace Amendment 16. No tax on income, tips, food, healthcare or property owned.
Friedman's proposal was associated with work in that the "negative income tax" was paired with income from a job not just a UBI check. My own anecdote was the extreme poverty is a greater motivator than any form of ambition or outside encouragement. I worked harder and longer to get out of it. Animals tend to work enough to meet their needs. A jaguar doesn't spend energy hunting when it isn't hungry. Birds stop with one nest because two would be a waste of energy. Humans aren't much different. Give them a place to stay and enough food to get by, and the largest motivators go away.
No idea who these 1000 participants were but if my family received an extra $1000 a month, that would have an improvement to our financial situation and net worth.
What is so wrong with leisure activities? Can't we just exist sometimes without making someone else money? Seems like the study showed that people in a stable financial system who got the free money chose to make less money over their own happiness. Like cmon man, stuff like being able to go to the doctor or dentist, (you chose dentist I'd assume cuz it just sounds less good and has a smaller percent change) is very important for PEOPLE. I really don't care what my net worth is if I'm healthy and happy and I think that is what most people want as well. The economy is not everything and numbers in a bank account are made up.
@@cooledcannon sure, we all need money so we can eat, afford do go to the doctor and dentist to take care of our health, and do things that give us purpose. I'm saying why is using money to improve your life instead of grinding for a system that doesn't work for you a bad thing? If I had enough money to live relatively comfortably every year I would definitely spend it to get more time with family and friends instead of just working more
@@cooledcannon so they aren't making as much money. But is their quality of life worse? I don't think simply looking at earnings is the best way to determine whether this is good or not. From what I saw in this video, quality of life was improved, but the UA-cam man discounted this and instead yapped about the numbers in their bank accounts. The UA-cam man said that spending money on these things was not good which is why I'm arguing against it, if you agree with me on that then great!
@@peanutreviews9396 What you are saying is true if they are merely earning less. However, they are becoming poorer. Like, if I took the money from UBI and spent it on QOL I would not become poorer. Something is making me drain money from other sources or something. This means you seriously have to look into the study and why. If you don't, and the mechanism holds, what this means is if you do a lot of UBI you make those people poorer. The poverty will make the quality of life worse if you don't figure this out. The idea behind UBI is to fight poverty so it's crucial to get this right.
Well if there are no jobs to be gained. Why does it matter if people train for skills or not. If I can't train for something I like. I will just focus on the other things I like even more. I. E. Everything else beyond working (which if I did not need the money to live, I would not do anyway). Give me leisure everyday of the week if I did not have to do shit work for pointless managers (which it seems won't have jobs either and don't have useful skills beyond that which makes them managers.). But then again, with 1000 dollars a month extra on top of what I earn now, I would also start working less, but I would go and train in datascience and statistics. One of those jobs that will dissappear according to you. Or I would study some other statistics based field. But I would still only study something I like. I am wasting away on a pointless prospectless job now anyways. One I still have 30000 in study debt for. So if I get another chance. I would not waste it on something that I do not like.
I just don't want to lose $1000 more per month to taxes. That would easily be enough to push me over the line of losing my apartment, or else getting a second job to survive.
@@Kitkat-986 yeah bereaucrats are one of those hurdles why it would not work in heavily bureaucratized countries. Which are pretty much all the western countries. With such an idea as UBI, it would require a serious overhaul of many rules that exist now to keep the capital in the hands with most capital. Those who would need UBI the most are always those who suffer the most with how taxation rules are set up. I would also get in serious trouble if 1000 moreon my bank account would mean that I would go into a higher tax rate, which would also mean I would no longer have a right at the rental that I have now. And because everyone get 1000 more. Prices will go up everywhere, the already very expensive rent-seeking parasites would become even more expensive, which in the end would mean no one would actually gain much. The same happens when salaries are raised systematically. In the end inflation will become worse which in the end would mean no one actually gains much if anything.
@@emiel89 The core issue is that socialism doesn't work, and socialists are too stupid to understand why. Mouse traps work because mice don't understand why the cheese is free.
Renting versus owning winds up being more complicated because people move around more for jobs and if you own, then you're stuck either selling it when you move or figuring out how to rent it while you're away. So, you greatly increase the possibility of being trapped in an area where economic opportunities are going away if that's what's happening in the area versus just renting. Really, with how the economy has been changing, there shouldn't be so much emphasis on owning as a pathway to wealth as it's just not realistic for most young people these days.
Lately my argument for UBI has been that people working below the poverty line are actually subsidizing their employers: because they are not able to refuse work without dire consequences. This is even made explicit when we learn that many Walmart and McDonald's workers rely on foodstamps to survive. If you want to tie it into a Land Value Tax (georgism): companies take from the commons by monopolizing land. It is fair for the government to tax that land and redistribute the proceeds through UBI.
It only failed if you don't care about people's well-being. What you're not considering is the increase in labor from machines. A world where machines replace workers, there will be incrasingly less need for human labor.
Having poor relatives, I could have tell you exactly why UBI would fail. These people worked harder to get as much money as they could from the government rather than maintain a job. They would spend all of their money within days of getting it on frivolous things, and had no ability to consider savings, investment, or personal responsibility. You cannot just give people money and expect them to use it wisely.
Lots of good discussion in the comments, I know this topic by nature is a little controversial. Thank you for the enthusiasm, everyone!
Just wanted to address a few common themes:
1. Yes, Milton Friedman's idea for a negative income tax works quite differently to this form of monthly income UBI. Should have made that clearer in the video. Let me know if you want a follow-up video on that.
2. Some people are saying that it's fine to be poorer if they're happier. The study did measure this and people were NOT happier in the long run. Happiness increased from year 1, but disappeared by year 3. People simply habituated to the higher income. openresearch-web.files.svdcdn.com/production/assets/documents/Documentation/w32784.pdf?dm=1723679143
3. Some people are saying that working less and spending more on leisure should improve physical and mental health. The study also measured this and found no improvements, not even a small improvement in physical health. Mental health was boosted in year 1 (as you would expect) but disappeared by year 2. Again, people just habituated to the money. openresearch-web.files.svdcdn.com/production/assets/documents/Documentation/w32711.pdf?dm=1721432661
4. And finally, yes, a true UBI study can never be done unless you truly give everyone in the country the money, which yes, will have a greater impact on things like inflation. Valid point.
So in summary, this study showed that UBI (in the form of $1000 per month) makes Americans poorer ($1000 on average), with no long-term improvements in happiness, physical health, mental health or financial stability.
To be worried about basics is also a problem. People can't see the big picture. There are many different incentives to make more people work than forced labor. Another point is that there are places where people work for the sake of working. Producing nothing good or pollution. You can't make those unhealthy to work or work in bad conditions when they don't need to.
Democratic world is a lie.
Environment and system is bad, unhealthy. Demands without providing.
@@PeteJudo1 Thanks for elaborating further on what the study found!
You may see things change with the next generations. That is also something to consider. Parents' problems equal the problems of children. But you need more than just UBI.
To be clear, Milton Friedman didn't like UBI or negative income tax. He's made clear, that if he were compelled to come up with something like UBI at gunpoint it'd be a negative income tax.
Milton Friedman's beliefs changed over his lifetime. When he was younger and made his contributions to economics, he supported the NIT pretty wholeheartedly.
Capitalism and Freedom Ch. 7:
> Suppose one accepts, **as I do**, this line of reasoning as justifying governmental action to alleviate poverty; to set, as it were, a floor under the standard of life of every erson in the community. There remain the questions, how much and how. I see no way of deciding "how much" except in terms of the amount of taxes we - by which I mean the great bulk of us- are willing to impose on ourselves for the purpose
Later, he got more involved in politics, stopped/slowed research, and his beliefs changed.
Free to Choose
> Most of the present welfare programs should never have been enacted. If they had not been, many of the people now dependent on them would have become self-reliant ndividuals instead of wards of the state. In the short run that might have appeared cruel for some, leaving them no option to low-paying, unattractive work. But in the long run it would have been far more humane. However, given that the welfare programs exist, they cannot simply be abolished overnight. We need some way to ease the transition from where we are to where we would like to be, of providing assistance to people now dependent on welfare while at the same time encouraging an orderly transfer of people from welfare rolls to payrolls.
I was under the impression that at least in his later years, he did advocate for it since he said it would be impossible to get rid of welfare. It's been a while though so I could be wrong
There will always be people who are a net negative on everyone else.
IIRC, Friedman's view was that one UBI would be less worse than a byzantine mess of welfare programs.
@@WarningStrangerDanger warning, stranger danger
Those who advocate UBI and research it are ambitious people who enjoy work and prioritize career. As an Industrial Psychologist I would see senior managers projecting their own drive and motivation onto staff. A common theme was "if they had more involvement they would work harder". They didn't, at the shop floor level most employees did not want more responsibility or involvement, they wanted to do the job and leave at the shift end and not think about work until the next day. Those who were ambitious applied for promotion and rapidly advanced off the shop floor and left the others behind. There is an assumption in those who promote UBI that everyone wants more money not more time in the bar/bed/TV etc when there is no evidence for that at all. If there is evidence a lot of it points the other way; that a significant proportion of the population are very happy doing nothing. Look at those who inherit wealth, do they all work hard and achieve? No, despite the absence of any financial strain many lead idle lives and turn to drugs and drink. Wealth alone does not prevent idleness or create productivity.
Perfect comment that should be pinned to the top. I also think a lot of these smart, ambitious, educated people, coming up with UBI plans, are just projected their own motivations onto poor, ignorant, lazy people who would be the most affected by free money dropping on their laps.
I think its a bit disengenous and assumptive to claim people are lazy and want to do nothing without consitering that maybe they are simply overworked or maybe they just are not as interested in working for somebody else's company as they are in working to build something themself.
Thank you. I think HONEST psychology is not involved enough when we deal with economic issues. People are more complex than productivity numbers. Great comment.
@@LukeSkydragonif you explore the world, you will see that this is mostly true, only a segment of society is really driven. The rest is a mix of lazy but most of all “just content” people. The content people part is more clearly seen in places outside the USA where the materialistic propaganda is not so strong. Humans mostly just wanna get by and if they can work less for it, the better.
These people want more time at the bar/bed/tv.
Giving them UBI helps with this.
So lets give them UBI.
We don't want a future with vast wealth but everyone too busy working their backsides off to enjoy the wealth.
Milton Friedman's UBI "negative income tax" system also required all other forms of welfare and social programs be eliminated, and that the UBI proportionally decrease as people had income of their own.
That's not universal income then. That's just means-tested universal welfare.
It would just be an inscentive for more under the table income.
@@pondracek That's the whole point.
@@pondracekFriedman came up with the idea for Ubi, you don't get to define it, he does.
@@99EKjohn Friedman literally said that if someone held a gun to his head and made him deliver UBI, he would deliver a negative tax for low income earners.
Friedman didn't 'invent' UBI either.
The definition is right there in the name. Universal = everyone gets it (not means tested) Basic = ideally enough to cover cost of living, Income = Money (Not food stamps)
_"In my opinion, lump sum (UBI payment) is better."_
Look, if you're talking about giving smart kids just out of school a "graduation gift" type of UBI, maybe you're right. But I grew up poor, in a poor neighborhood, among generationally poor people. Giving the average person I grew up with a lump sum of $40,000 would not have helped them escape poverty. It would have helped them dress REALLY well for a few months
"Honey, the Caprice is getting a new set of rims! woot woot!"
Except it probably doesn't.
Well I must be a poor "smart" person because 40k would completely change my life if I could invest that.
@@firefly9838 yes you are smarter than average poor people
They could dress well all the same if they received it every month. So overall, lump sum would still perform better.
I think everyone is not being truthful about why we work in the first place. This study only proves that. We work not just to work but because we have too. That is why get 'rich quick schemes' are so attractive. We all have different interests and if we had the money to then we would invest in them. Another truth is that sometimes people just want a simple life. Lets be real, UBI was made so that we all have a baseline. While some want more than others and this would only help them, others are simple and truly do not need a lot to be happy/peaceful.
I'm more concerned that anybody seriously thought people worked because they want to work, rather than to fulfill their needs, in the first place.
I dont know if that's totally true. A lot of wealthy retirement age+ people continue working because they want to work, some work until they absolutely can't anymore. Not everybody stops working the minute they no longer have to.
"want to" in the context that they've been conditioned their entire lives to work.
@@Llortnerof I mean, to some extent people do. But that tends to be the case more with attractive jobs, the jobs at the bottom often have horrid conditions, and scum of the earth for managers. I'd think UBI would teach people to be better, at least it seems to me that there's a pretty strong correlation between social safety nets, and quality of lower end employers(e.g. north european work culture is better than almost anywhere else, for the bottom of the ladder)
@@iverbrnstad791 If you check the jobs, it's basically always those they can freely choose to do or not do and choose their clients for. In a way, it's more of a hobby they happen to get paid for.
Those that do work because they need money pretty much never fall into that.
I just read the UBI paper, and I thought the Western Blot images looked awfully fishy.
LOOOL
Comment of the year contender fo sho
@@PeteJudo1
19m0s - "it's kind of a solution"
It's GDP counterfeiting.
You brought a smile to my face. Thank you.
Did you read that the research was done by Y Combinator?
Ok, the UBI Trial didn't make poor people act like a higher social class, long time horizons, conscientiousness, etc. this does puncture the narrative that people will stop acting poor if you give them money. So this is a check on too-optimistic stories about social reform via simple economic and policy interventions. It does pretty directly refute the argument that poverty is mainly caused by the stress of not having enough money.
But it doesn't say much at all about whether UBI would be a workable response to mass unemployment. The need there is avoid total humanitarian and economic disaster.
Most poor people come from generations of poor people. They've learned how to survive while poor. Even if you consider this to be an entirely socially constructed inheritance it would take generations for the class structure to adapt to the new conditions.
Yeah, I would really be interested in psychological perspective - what was going in their minds, what motivations they had, what emotions they had, etc. After encountering psychological problems myself and reading/viewing/listening about psychology, I've got to say that human mind is a very irrational place, by default dominated by emotions. Intelligence is often "recruited" by emotions to justify behaviours which from outside perspective look non-sensical or even self-destructive.
@@Hexanitrobenzene Hand-to-mouth is a very particular mode of existence. If you get some money you spend it: if you don't, somebody/something will come and take it. It sounds crazy from the outside but it works.
A worse mode involves drugs (including alcohol). BEFORE anything else you've got to establish basic sense of wellbeing (like getting in out of the storm and getting warm). Wonder why, when the plant shuts down (and there should be less money to buy stuff) there's a huge drug-boom?
The timeframe is the greatest flaws in the study is timeframe, as well as time to recover from living u see financial duress for so long.
For example, People need time to recover from acute stressors such as shock to unexpected job loss. Most people might require a week to rest from such an event. It is not surprising to hear that people who have been money poor seek leisure(rest). From the chronic impact of poverty stress and the physical toll of working one or even two jobs for so long.
Furthermore, this study would have an effect that is not discussed and that is UBI will end when the study ends. This would undoubtedly have an effect on the individuals desire to use UBI in the way that is theorized. If you get UBI for a year but now it will end then most impoverished people will use UBI in a manner that tackles short term gains.
Behaviors take time to change as well as time to feel safe.
It would be similar to when a young person gets a credit card for the first time and they get into debt right away. They just don't know how to manage it. But if you had UDI plus universal healthcare, wages that increase with inflation and job security, you would see a change, like it did after WW2 with all those housing provisions. Also, If you are participating in a study that will give you money but only for 3 years, you might as well spend it, because you know it will go away.
@robmacl7 This reminds me of the concept of the New Rich vs. The Old Rich. The New Rich buys extravagant, but wasteful things because they can now buy whatever their heart desires, but the Old Rich is used to having money and had years of being taught about personal finances, budgeting, investing, and in some cases, knowing how to find legal financial loopholes, so they don't flash their money and it lasts for much longer. A person living in generations of poverty won't become the Old Rich in 3 years; it's not even long enough to raise a new generation with that money.
My first thoughts on people working less when they have some guaranteed income is that they didn't work that much less. Rounding up to 2hr a week is 104hrs a year. Looking at am 8 hour days five days a weeks thats the same as taking a 2 week vacation and 3 sick day. Seems like a bit of security was able to make up for a bad employments contract and lax labour laws.
This whole study is a massive series of question marks. The fact it was during covid where virtually eveyone sat at home and did nothing makes the whole study meaningless. Also these economic theories seem to be totally different from what I've read about UBI. The whole premise is you restructure your economy. You get rid of the minimum wage, and you have a smooth gradient between employed and unemployed. In the current system it's binary you're either employable or you're not, if you're employable there's a good chance you're trapped in the bulge of people who can't make more than minimum wage. The point is nobody in the minimum wage bulge nor the unemployed have any incentive to be more productive. That's horrible for the economy. The idea is to create a smooth transition in wages. If you're less productive than minimum wage you're unemployable, you need to meet that minimum bar. The narrative being produced is that under productive people will fix themselves. When it's the total opposite, employers would become better at employing the unproductive. The gain to the economy would be a steeper gradient in wages. That way people make way more from working hard or substantially less for not being productive. In the current economy, two people of radically different productivity levels get paid roughly the same amount via minimum wage. Like even if you're lazy, you'd rather work 20 hours a week for $8 an hour, than work 40 for $4 an hour. Being twice as productive is a huge benefit to the economy if you look at it from the employers perspective. It also creates an economic environment where employers want their people to improve.
The negative income tax was a great deal more than a UBI. It was also a wage subsidy for those who worked.
Hmm interesting point you make here. in other words promote the activity of working
Negative income tax isn’t UBI at all. If you don’t work you don’t get any income. Making it non-universal.
@@legatemichael Yes, because there are so many non monetary benefits to working- self-worth, comradery, etc.
@@caiparry-jones9775 My understanding was that it would provide a basic guaranteed income even for those who didn't work.
I believe the general layout (for Milton Friedman's version) was as follows, I will use simple numbers to explain (it's been a while so this may be off a little and I do not remember which numbers he proposed specifically):
-Set a median income - well say $100k
-Set the rate - well say 20%
-Then you get taxed or subsidized 20% of the difference between your income and the median income
So if you make $0 (unemployed) you are 100k away from the median income ($100k) so you get subsidized 20% of that which is $20k = $20k total income
If you make $20k in income, you are $80k away from $100k so you get 20% of that difference which is $16k = $36k total
If you make $90k in income, you are $10k away from $100k so you get 20% of that difference which is $2k = $92k total
If you make $150k you are $50k above the $100k which means you pay 20% of that difference ($50k) which means you pay $10k in taxes = $140k take home income
@@caiparry-jones9775 The goal of UBI is to lift those who are stuck. It won't do anything to those who voluntarily chose it (yes, some homeless are self-directed). But I agree it is not universal (shouldn't be). I also agree that negative income tax is better than UBI and has the lump sum effect Pete is talking about (which I agree). If they gonna implement UBI, it has to be case by case basis since some people also don't know what is causing them to 'stuck' and UBI needs to consider and solve it as a part of the program
People working less because they get free money isn't that surprising, but it also isn't a condemnation of UBI. Americans are vastly overworked.
The condemnation is that UBI makes people poorer. Which in a vacuum is super devastating. It would be fine if UBI simply maintained the increased 36k net worth, or even just maintained the same net worth, but they got poorer.
If people worked less and both net and individual/household wealth increased, that would be one thing. What we saw instead was that not only did the program consume wealth from the funders (in a real implementation this would be middle class tax payers), it actually made the recipients less wealthy too. This is despite the fact the average American could see a substantial increase in long term economic status simply by paying off credit card debts, something which requires zero effort to do with a stack of free money.
The first question that came to my mind was simply: were the participants generational poor or recently laid-off workers that had otherwise a long work history but were hitting hard times? I believe there might be a need for basic financial education for the first group, or even both groups. Getting out of generational poverty is a lot harder, because your whole family and support system is made of other poor people. You might not even have a single family member who has experienced moderate success in their life. So, as an individual, you might not even have a single role model. Maybe pairing this study with a weekly visit from a social worker would have increased the chances of success? (but yeah, there was the pandemic...)
The families where randomly assigned to treatment vs control, so that shouldn't matter.
@@borisn.1346 Thanks Boris, I will do my homework, and go check the original study!
I don't know about that. Lots of dirt poor immigrants arrive I. America and are able to figure a way out of poverty. So it's not so much a poverty frame of mind but an entitled spoiled viewpoint.
The problem is not UBI, it’s capitalism. UBI makes people more dependent on money , capitalism makes it even more scarce so that it can exploit natural and Human Resources.
You want society to become rich, don’t give them
Money, give them power to be independent.
Plusmartini, that's literally what capitalism is, giving power to individuals to be independent. UBI doesn't work because it does the opposite of being independent. Capitalism does not make resources scarce, it makes them abundant, something even Marx admitted.
And funnily enough, looking at Marx's life, it starts to seem apparent that we need a system where people are able to be independent and own things instead of relaying on their fellow political philosopher's money (Marx depended heavily on Engels), I wonder what's a system that advocates for individual power, market freedoms and liberties...
The lumpsum UBI would be atrocious. I'm not saying this would be a perfect corelation, but look at lottery winners. When people don't know how to manage their finances, they go broke and burn through any money they're given. What people need is to realize the value of how long it will take them to earn a significant amount of money on their own. When you realize that new car's price tag is equivalent to 10 months of you working, you start to re-think how you are managing and valuing the money you have and earn.
poor analogy.
most lottery winners opted for a singular payment at the start (instead of payments at fixed intervals), resulting in a sudden influx of cash at a quantity beyond their comprehension.
I imagine UBI recipients have at least seen that much money at some point in their lives, and know its purchasing power.
UBI is just dumb bec there are just dumb people -- there is no realization. People that become rich when they are poor have a managed budget and live within their means while trying to find good work that can exponentially grow while learning on the side. When you ask them they find creative ways to get free stuff to lower their expenses.
UBI just helps dumb people to survive basically not showing them reality. It would lead to worse results especially when such programs stop.
Lottery players is a poor co-hort of people to study for responsibility with money. UBI would go to all that need it. Which means some idiots sure. But also smarter people.
Your logic is flawed. Lottery winners are by definition, people who play the lottery. Playing the lottery is a pretty 1-1 correlation with poor financial choices, and isn't representative of the populace as a whole.
Additionally, lottery lump sum is of a significantly higher amount, and is also by definition not universal. That has a lot of effects involving social connection and isolation, which exacerbate the problems you were talking about.
@@kailianglf2 you imagine, but there's no evidence.
Entering PhD studying and seeing how weird media interpretations of even business performance (let alone research) appear
What field are you studying?
@IARRCSim Economics. What I've been talking about refers not to what I plan to study (food supply chain analytics), but rather, it was a one-sided interpretation of the ratio of revenue to the number of employees. As if you come to the company, *you* immediately earn that much money... Which is bollocks
I did want to add a little bit on the Friedman part , Friedman was not in favor of UBI in the modern sense, where everyone receives a flat payment regardless of whether they work. His negative income tax concept was work-contingent, meaning that it provided a safety net but still incentivized people to work. He saw UBI, which provides unconditional payments, as problematic because it could discourage work and create a dependency on government aid.
And he still never trusted government to be able to implement it. Friedman often talked about the fact that work is one of the main ways to maintain human dignity And self reliance. Additionally no amount of money can change culture
The effect that I bet is obscured by study design here is that, if UBI is, in fact, universal in a pretty-much closed system like a city or a state, in a society with a rentier class, prices of the bottom tier of rented assets and purchased consumables will rise to absorb and obviate the UBI. So even if recipients are somehow made to be financially adept, “market forces” still ensure a subsistence tier in society.
It's inflationary. The way I see it is it would essentially always be not enough, because no matter how much you increase it to, it effectively would become the new "zero". I don't really see how it's different to how unemployment benefits work here in NZ, where we have families that haven't worked for 4 generations.
So your assumption is that the economy is a zero sun game, the existence of the poor is required for the rest of us to have some level of comfort? We can never improve things because they will just reset to the next lowest level?
@@Patrick-857 it's only inflationary if money is printed to pay for it.
@@ctrlaltdebug I think you're wrong. It's the same as miminum wage and unemployment benefits. It's inflationary because the price of everything rises to meet the new amount almost immediately, so nobody us better off than they were before. Inflation isn't just caused by money printing.
@teagancombest6049 It will always be a Pareto distribution. Pareto distributions are in nature, so to me it's a law of nature. Attempts at wealth redistribution always result in perverse outcomes and always fail at achieving the intended goal. This is because the buyer and seller decide on value, not the government or any other third party in a transaction. When government attempts to redistribute value through something like a UBI, it creates a short-term anomaly in the economy, before it naturally goes back to an equilibrium that looks pretty similar to what it was before the redistribution occurred. A UBI would simply devalue the currency and probably cause a massive capital flight due to the huge taxes required to pay for it. It simply won't work. Currency is a token of value. Value has to come from somewhere, usually goods, services, commodities ect. If you pay everyone for nothing, then nothing of value is being exchanged for that money, and over time that causes the money itself to be worthless. And arguing that people who receive a UBI will still work because they want to work is an argument that comes from people who are privileged enough to have never experienced the really crappy jobs most of us have to endure. If I could earn a living doing nothing, I'd quit yesterday. My job is destroying my health.
UBI is essentially "I can't believe it's not real communism"
The idea of giving people the UBI in a lump sum would require those people to be financially literate.
I fail to see how "people when given free money, choose to spend their time in enjoyable ways more, rather than working for money" is either a shocking discovery or a failure.
Because the people who propose UBI are either intentionally deceptive (like those advocating for welfare) or stupid.
Welfare, since its inception, has caused a complete stagnation in wages (along side women entering the workforce in full).
UBI makes everyone a net negative on society unless they pay, in taxes, more than they earn from UBI. Problem being, people are naturally lazy. You offer them free stuff, and they will destroy it in not time flat. Look at “the projects” in chicago.
No, people need to earn their way. If they aren’t required to, society will collapse almost instantly
You are grossly simplifying this topic to suit your "pull yourself up by the bootstraps worldview". You also make far too many unsubstantiated claims that clearly stem from a lack of intimate engagement with reality. Take a step away from Fox news for a moment man.
Corporate greed and artificial inflation has made it so that no matter how high wages increase, even if there was government intervention to force a minimum wage increase, the baseline would always be significantly less than what is really livable for the vast majority of people.
Most UBI proposals are roughly $2500 a month, which in states like California is just enough to pay rent in a small apartment. I have no data to back this up, but I don't imagine most people are comfortable with just the bare necessities. You act like we would be paying so that people can be lazy and live a life of luxury, when its really just paying for a bottom line. More people not having to struggle to pay for very basic needs, means more people that can reasonably pursue higher educations and put more focus honing in on creating a quality home environment for the next generation.
The Chicago projects is a horrible analogy also. Let's not pretend like there isn't a long history of bullshit that those communities have had to deal with over the decades. They have had to deal with complete erosion of mental health and the family structures that are necessary to produce the kind of people that can properly function in a society. The breakdown of these communities is largely due to drug abuse (a coping mechanism used to escape their harsh environment) and drug trafficking(a means used by people who have historically been given minimal means of economic development). They are exactly the kind of people who need the kind of alleviation from financial pressures that we are talking about here.
No people are not "naturally lazy", on what basis can you honestly look at the vast history of mankind and deduce such a stupid conclusion. People are unmotivated to do things they have no interest in, thus when forced into circumstances in which they must constantly engage in things they can't put their soul into, the products they produce are obviously going to be soulless. People have to do these things they hate because they lack the finances to do anything else.
I'm completely open discussion on this topic, and I know for a fact that there are angles on this subject that I am not considering. This is a complex topic that requires intelligent conversation to work through. Please learn to have some nuance in your discourse.
I’d pump the brakes on calling other people stupid when your view of economics is as stupid as « welfare and women are the cause of wage stagnation ». What’s your education on the subject? The internet? Maybe keep quiet then and read more papers instead of opinion pieces.
Nobody said that it is a "surprising discovery" that people spend more time on leisure with UBI, and this is a disingenuous take of the video. The surprising finding, that is underreported in media, is that people who got UBI made less money overall, and their net worth dropped, significantly more than the group that didn't get UBI. This suggests that UBI has a net negative impact on your earnings and wealth. This is a surprising finding, and should be reported. As should people's increase in leisure and enjoyment be reported. They should all be accounted for in the whole picture, yet for some reason, the former finding is ignored.
@@goldenhate6649 The people who propose UBI are not being deceptive or stupid. It is a system intentionally thought of as something to be put in place when humans simply are not needed (At least in any noticeable quantity) to ''run the system''. No, people do not ''need to earn their way'', that need is simply a consequence of how humans run society.
Frankly I think the presumption that everybody who gets the UBI will use it like an economist thinks best is both high handed and short sighted. They’ve made an economic decision that their leisure is more important than their long term financial stability. Why? Because that is what they think they see wealthy people do. UBI with out a reasonable and clear path to done “next level” is meaningless to most people.
The point is not that leisure time for poor people is bad. It is that yhe predicted outcome of the experiment didn’t happen. In science, that means either the model of human behavior we have is bad, or the study is flawed. It doesn't matter that we would all like more cash or that we would like to give more to the poor. The study doesn't say the motives are wrong. The results just question the method for achieving the desired outcome. And making sure you method actually works it the difference between wanting to help and actually helping. I agree that the pandemic makes the results questionable. But it suggests that UBI might have problems during economic crisis. This should be investigated more before it is implemented.
What predicted outcome? The expectation of having more net worth or assets is only in Pete's head, he's the one who believes that it's the only end point. The study didn't have it. It was just one of the things that it measured.
Many of the more generally expected outcomes actually happened: more leisure time, better standard of living, better mental and physical health, etc.
@vfwh I have listened to a bunch of talks on UBI and they all suggested it would be a financial gain for the recipients that would lift them out of poverty. So, I think it's fair to say this was a predicted outcome. But you are right that they also predict a better life. And more time to spend with family or to just rest is a definite benefit to the less wealthy. I was once very poor (not just not as wealthy) and I was working three to four jobs at once. More rest would have been welcome. I was also getting an education so I could lift my family out of this situation. That that last part didn't work in the UBI study worries me. But again think the pandemic is a big confounding factor.
@@raymondlines5404 You're right about the education thing, and I agree that it's a disappointment.
Regarding "lifting people out of poverty", do you really think that having $1k more after three years in assets, while you're getting $950 less in monthly income, is a net financial gain? I find that view completely idiotic.
What I'm reacting to here and in Pete's video is two things:
- this kind of literally reactionary impulse that he definitely lets loose that poor people spending more time and resource on leisure is, frankly the way he says it, almost disgusting. I find that kind of moral outrage repulsive, and I think I'm over indexing.
- second, the idea that UBI failed because basically, people who had $1k per month extra for 3 years (and in a real UBI situation, this would be indefinite for life) somehow fucked up because they cared less about $1k after three years compared to people who were only getting $50. This is Pete's main (and practically only) point.
The only logical conclusion from this point is that given a deal where you get $1k a month for life, but have $1k less in assets after three years, vs. getting $50 every month, working more and having generally worse outcomes all-round, all of it to boast having $1k in the bank more after three years, you'd be better off turning down the $1k a month and take the $50 deal?
How completely fucked up is this worldview? Both financially and morally?
@@vfwh and most of those ended being worse than the previous 5 year average,if only slightly.
@@Robdavis1990 Most of what?
As a person very interested in UBI and having read a fair bit about it, I had to view this video because the title was so much at variance with everything that I know about UBI. I also work with persons living in poverty and know how important every dollar is to them, and how they go without many of the things that people in the middle class take for granted. The fact that the subjects who spent their money on leisure or on their teeth - things that most of us take for granted - was likely that they wanted to enjoy the qualify of life that the rest of us do. Someone with better teeth and less oral pain is likely much happier than before, even though this might not show up as “wealth”. And did the people who work 1.4 hours less a week have one job or two? Several studies have shown that people who receive UBI are more likely to: raise their educational level, seek to become entrepreneurs, spend more time raising their children, etc. I’ll have a read of the study to find out exactly what it says, but this video did not convince me that UBI was wasteful or harmful. There is a very real danger that this study will serve to arm people who believe that being poor is a moral failing and that nothing we do will help them.
This study did take place during Covid-19, so choosing not to work more could be a way to lessen the chance of interacting with some with covid-19 and catching it
Earning a little bit less but not working full time plus anymore is a positive for me - life quality would be my 1st point, not net worth
I find that you miss the ‘B’ in UBI like everyone else. The stuff you start taking about is more general welfare.
Yeah, the study was made in TX. What did you expect?
@@shiftyjedi3417 I'm not sure I understand your comment. UBI is meant to improve people's welfare by providing a basic income. Persons with special needs (e.g., living with autism) would still require additional financial assistance.
So, UBI made people about $1500 dollars poorer than the control, which is almost ideal to the amount actually given to the control, meaning that UBI of $12,000 makes you exactly as wealthy as you would be without any assistance, but means you can spend more time and money on leisure and personal enrichment. Isn’t that exactly what UBI is meant to do? Not make people richer, but maintain or improve their lifestyle even when receiving less money from work?
and everyone saying it "failed" are ignoring that that is exactly what a UBI is for.
that is certainly a way to spin "removes their drive to be productive members of society" :P
@@kittysplode "Drive to be productive members of society" is a very kind way of saying "extorting people to accept subpar work conditions under threat of starvation".
@@stefangadshijew1682accepting subpar work under threat of starvation is the human condition - really, the condition of *every* living thing. It's not extortion. It's the life all life is selected for.
yeah this isn't some investment plan, you're paying off the inherent mental health and toil you'd have to sell off normally not to grow, but to survive
i fantasise about a world where my 'unproductive' neighbours can eat from the taxes i pay to the state instead of it going to more expensive tech for the military, not hoping they can become 10x coders and build bridges necessarily, but because they feel hunger
saying it 'doesn't work' is just saying you put exactly $0 on a human's well-being, seeing as a simple liberal economic analysis would see these people as more productive if they didn't accept the money, didn't work, and just starved
9:53 so people started to relax from they hellish churn? Understandable to me.
On someone else’s dime. It must always be remembered that government has no money: it only has what it takes from us with force.
Those who are paying have their own hellish churn…
You can still get kicked out of your house. You don’t own it, the state charges rent
Abolish property tax. If I buy land, I should own it.
@@Kitkat-986 agreed. It’s immoral
@@Kitkat-986 Suppose you get $50K a year, and spend $10K on the various maintenance costs of your house. Also suppose your neighbor earns $60K a year and rents an identical house for $20K. Should your neighbor pay more tax than you? And if the answer is "no", on what basis should tax be collected that makes his tax bill equal to or less than yours?
@@BaddeJimmewhy should the tax bills be equivalent?
@@Felale The neighbor has essentially the same house, and after paying housing costs, the same income. On paper he earns more, but in reality he is no better off.
Dunno, if you can afford to drop your second job and finally have time for your kids or just to de-stress "more leasure time" seems like an absolute win in my book. Also: how did they calculate net worth? If the 36k guys invested in a car for example, they prob now also have higher insurance costs. It's not like you can expect them to invest the money into stocks when they have been needing a new washing machine, phone, etc. or repairs in the house for years maybe. Or it went into paying off dept, who knows from just networth? This single measure that's so important apparently. How are you gonna measure the value of a doctor visit? I would much prefer no toothache than having a higher networth. Or how do you measure being able to pay for insuline? Networth just aint the right measure to look at. Btw. except for the paying off depts, the economy profits from those small investments like cars, washing machines, etc. no?
> "Dunno, if you can afford to drop your second job and finally have time for your kids or just to de-stress "more leasure time" seems like an absolute win in my book."
Except we know for sure that that's not what happened, because the recipients spent no more time with their families than did the control group.
> "Or it went into paying off dept, who knows from just networth?"
First: debt is subtracted from assets to calculate your net worth, so paying off debt increases your net worth by a like amount. So that's not it.
Second: the recipients just straightforwardly spent more money and took on more debt than the controls.
The thing to understand is that this is not just some weird bookkeeping trick. Receiving the money caused participants to work less, to live beyond their means and to make worse financial decisions, in a way that reduced their wealth by more than the free money increased it. It made them poorer, in the true sense of that word.
> "How are you gonna measure the value of a doctor visit?"
By checking the standard sorts of variables that are looked at in studies like this to aggregate a person's state of health. Though the recipients went to the doctor more than the controls, this did not thereby improve their health outcomes in any way - a familiar result from RCTs that measure the effect of health spending on health outcomes.
> "Or how do you measure being able to pay for insuline?" [sic]
That's the easiest thing in the world for a study like this to pick up on, because the diabetic who doesn't get insulin just dies.
C.H. Douglas dividend is better from all perspectives because:
-tied to economic activity so it can go up and down however the more technology uses an economy the more the dividend will rise.
-not funded from taxes.
-debt free since it compensates incomes with prices along another mechanism.
-antinflationary for being indexed to productivity.
-democratical because it spreads over the entire population the acquisitive power.
-the artificial advantage of lower prices of products coming from low income countries is reduced since people have access to a broder range of consumer products and are able to cover the cost of salaries in their own countries.
-it must be applied with the compensated price mechanism also proposed by C.H. Douglas
@@OptimalOwl We know none of these things for sure, because the actual study isn't even linked here, and studies done elsewhere at other times on the same subject that do have links to the study, show quite the opposite of what you're saying.
@@thelelanatorlol3978
> "We know none of these things for sure, because the actual study isn't even linked here"
This is a mild inconvenience, not an insurmountable obstacle. I found a non-paywalled copy in less than 10 minutes with my regular search engine. You can do it in half that time with Sci-Hub.
> "[other tdies] show quite the opposite of what you're saying."
That's not actually true though, is it?
To repeat and sum up the claims I made:
1) recipients lived beyond their means and went into debt
2) recipients spent no more time with their families
3) recipients spent more on healthcare, but this did not improve their health outcomes
There are basic income RCTs that find various things, but unless I'm missing something, none of them have anything to say about 1) or 2).
As for 3), as I said, this is just completely 100% in line with earlier results of health spending RCTs. When you pay for people in the First World to have more healthcare, this makes them actually have more healthcare (more doctor's visits, more treatments, more medications, all the rest of it, exactly as you'd expect,) but this does not improve their health outcomes.
Trying to make people earn more by giving them free money is a really weird angle for UBI.
Isn't the whole point of UBI that as automation devalues labor, we need to support the people who can no longer produce enough value to support a decent lifestyle?
Reasons why dividend proposed in Social Credit is a better idea.
C.H. Douglas's dividend concept presents several compelling arguments for its implementation. Here’s a summary of the key points outlining its advantages:
### Moral Justification
- **Equitable Distribution**: The dividend acknowledges the contributions of previous generations and human inventions, ensuring that everyone benefits from societal advancements.
### Economic Ties
- **Linked to Economic Activity**: The dividend adjusts with economic fluctuations, potentially increasing as technology enhances productivity. This adaptability can lead to more substantial dividends over time it as well may drop if not enough productivity is achieved.
### Funding Mechanism
- **Not Tax-Funded**: Unlike traditional welfare programs, the dividend is not reliant on taxes, which can alleviate concerns about fiscal sustainability and government dependency.
### Debt-Free Structure
- **Compensation Mechanism**: By balancing incomes with prices, the dividend operates without incurring debt, promoting a healthier economic environment.
### Anti-Inflationary Properties
- **Indexed to Productivity**: Since the dividend is tied to productivity, it can help stabilize purchasing power and counteract inflationary pressures.
### Democratic Distribution
- **Universal Benefit**: The dividend is distributed across the entire population, enhancing collective purchasing power and fostering economic equality.
### Addressing Global Disparities
- **Mitigating Low-Cost Advantages**: By providing broader access to consumer products, the dividend helps level the playing field against the artificial advantages of low prices from lower-income countries.
### Complementary Mechanism
- **Compensated Price Mechanism**: For optimal effectiveness, the dividend should be paired with Douglas's compensated price mechanism, ensuring that prices reflect true costs while maintaining economic balance.
### Conclusion
Overall, C.H. Douglas's dividend model promotes social equity, economic stability, and a more democratic distribution of wealth, making it a potentially transformative approach to modern economic challenges.
farming still uses tons of cheap labor, often with harsh working conditions due to lax safety regulations, automation hasn't eliminated the need for a large labor force.
Farming went from 40% of the workforce in 1900 to less than 2% in 1990.
This is highly misleading. Farming used to employ large number of workers and support entire communities. Now the work is casual, seasonal, and cannot support any stable communities, leading to a collapse of rural populations, depopulation of many areas (and/or replacement by holiday homes/second homes, which do not support the local economy.
@@aj1218 This is because of the development of other jobs in society, not because farming was automated.
@@exiled_londoner You are bemoaning the fact that people have a better option now than to farm? You want a single industry like farming to support a community? That shouldn't be something you should be advocating for. Rather advocate for other jobs to enter those communities
@@azraeldemuirgos9518 -
I wasn't 'bemoaning' anything but merely pointing out a factual reality. However, if you believe that rural communities should have some economic viability and security, that people should not be forced into towns to find work and/or housing, and that food production should be environmentally sustainable AND should provide food that people actually need instead of what produces the greatest profit for the middlemen, then changing the entire rural/agricultural economy is essential. At present the rich countries are destroying their own countryside with intensive farming, wholly unsustainable, high-input production methods, and practices which degrade soil quality (and therefore future productivity), while also imposing similarly unsustainable and damaging practices on agricultural communities in poorer countries.
A combination of inappropriate and unsustainable farming practices AND degradation of agricultural land and productivity due to Global Warming will drastically reduce food production and rural sustainability in the coming decades, and this is entirely foreseeable, yet virtually nothing effective is being don to avert this disaster, or even to ameliorate its effects. The plight of young people in rural England, Wales, or Scotland, who will be unable to find work or afford housing in their home villages, and forced to move away to larger towns, is a gross injustice, but it pales into relative insignificance when compared to the famine, mass displacement of populations, and social and economic collapse that will be (already is being) inflicted on hundreds of millions of people in poorer countries. And the chaos and disruption and violence this will bring will cause the refugee flows to richer countries in Europe and North America to increase exponentially, with all the associated strife and trauma and the rise of fascistic xenophobia that we already see in our politics.
I would say that horrific scenario (which is already well-advanced) justifies a bit of 'bemoaning'.
Counterpoint: @ 13:44, the sentences following the highlighted text say that what increased the most, relatively from baseline, was gifts to friends and kin. If friends & kin also had UBI, that wouldn't be the case, perhaps allowing redirecting of assets after the basics, including dental care (hardly trivial), and leisure. As your note above suggests, this project didn't test the "universal" in UBI.
And here i was thinking that UBI was one of the proposed "stop gap measures" to address the ever more likely potential scenario of mass technological job displacement. Imagine my surprise finding out it's actually a financial product that's all about "productivity" and "credit worthy consumers".
Yeah, it's literally one of three different options. UBI, mass death and starvation when the 1% can replace the 99% with AI and robots, or revolution.
We have a similar situation in Brazil. It's not UBI, but its something close, where the government pays the poorer families to keep their children at school.
In the month of august, we found out that a good portion of this money was being used in online casinos. Instead of people using it for food, education or whatever, it was gambled away
Did you actually find that out or is it like the time the right wing government in Brazil stacked fraudulent evidence against Lula as they kept him in jail so he couldn't run for president because he was going to smash bolsanaro?
Yeah, gambling should be illegal.
God that is DEPRESSING 💔
@@stefangadshijew1682if it is not gambling they spend the money that the government gave them, it's drugs or any other addiction.
I used to work in private equity and one of our investments was in a casino chain. Best day of the month typically was welfare day (revenue was 100% in the Benelux, for your information). Gambling is a dirty business. I call gambling/lotteries a tax on people who are bad at statistics (negative Net Present Value propositions)
There is so much these studies can never capture. Long term people who grow up in a society where UBI is normal can have a vastly different mindset than people who grew up with jobs being necessary. There us a massive difference in some people receiving the money and everyone receiving it. This is also different from negative income tax where only the people in need get it, which at slightly higher administrative cost is much more efficient.
People will also act differently if they know that the extra money they're getting is only temporary as long as the study is going on.
So, true communism argument, get out of here.
Ubi and a negative income tax are exactly equivalent. It's a negative marginal income tax, so it works as a tax credit for higher income people. It's like if the standard deduction was refundable.
Usually they are not the same. UBI is meant to be the same for everyone to minimise any administrative burden. As such it has massive impact on the entire economy and I have my doubts that it could even be made to work properly.
Meanwhile what is usually meant by negative income tax is progressive, meant only for low income people. If your income is zero, you get full amount paid out as a handout, no questions asked. Once you admit to higher income, it goes down in a simple mathematical rule checked by algorithms, so that earning more will always get you more money, even as the handout decreases. The idea is, that a lot of people would get a little, a few would get a lot, and most would get none. Still low-ish maintenance, trying to minimise perverse incentives to not work and split homes, but more similar to current wellfare programs than UBI.
It is mathematically the same. If you tax a high earner $1000 extra and give her $1000 UBI, that is the same thing as taxing her $1000 less and not giving out the UBI.
Given any UBI payment scheme, we can come up with a negative income tax rate and deduction amount that produces the same distribution of total income.
How is this counterintuitive? People have a natural balance where more effort is not worth marginal increases in comfort. In poorer societies that equilibrium is heavily balanced to seek more comfort but in a well off nation it is far more likely it is already at or above the point where equilibrium is found with less effort to achieve their currently acceptable level of effort.
Is marginal utility not discussed in economics any longer?
It's very counterintuitive. If what you are saying is true, then the prediction is UBI people would have similar net worths to non UBI, or perhaps slightly higher. If they have lower, it's devastating.
I **did not need a study** to know this. All UBI does is raise the income *floor.* This is PATENTLY OBVIOUS to anyone with basic math skills. Anyone who believes UBI is meant to HELP is absolutely insane, because the people in charge KNOW what the results will be.
Right, and the study didn't -- couldn't -- account for monetary inflation that would occur in large scale UBI
@@closerintime That is exactly correct. That's why the best analogy we have is an increase in minimum wage--which, as we all damn well know, never matters even slightly except in that it lowers the real wages of anyone who has a non-minimum-wage job.
I agree. UBI will never work in a monetary system where the government can add to the money supply whenever it wants to. UBI can only work in a closed system where there is a finite supply of money. In an open system, if every citizen is given a base amount of money to live on, this will cause inflation and the rise in costs of goods. The income will be inflated away.
Regarding the Liberian village pooling their money into lump sums, people likely wouldn't do exactly the same in the US, because the developed world's solution to that problem is loans.
Developed economies lost their sense of community.
We have created a world for which we are not evolved...
@DeltaDaedalus the Liberians were loaning each other money, they just don't have professional banks
@@Hexanitrobenzene ha. You know the Liberians eat their enemies, right?
@@samsonsoturian6013smart. We defend our enemies for some reason
This was discussed. Loans incur interest which then reduces the amount of the money that you get to use.
I know this is a nitpick, but it was technically the Roman Republic while Julius was in charge. It became the Roman Empire after his nephew Octavius assumed titles after defeating Cleopatra and Marc Anthony.
Again, it's just me nitpicking
nah it was always a republic and technically sulla started the process of it becoming a dictatorship
@@Tupadre97 Nope, OP was right.
If there were "so many different things in this study that it was basically impossible not to be able to spin the results of this study in a way to make UBI look favorable", then the opposite is also true that it was basically impossible not to be able to spin the results of this study in a way to make UBI look unfavorable.
In short, the results were inconclusive since they could have been interpreted however the researchers wanted. The one thing I was unable to determine was who paid for the study? I see that OpenResearch appears to be a spinoff of OpenAI and this is the only study they have done.
Mostly, I would argue though that this does pretty conclusively shut the door on the notion that if you give people UBI that they'll stop working. $1k a month is a lot of money and for them to still work nearly as much suggests that you can give a lot of UBI before it has any impact on people's willingness to work.
The pandemic stimulus checks are probably a better set of reports to base future policy on as those went out to nearly everybody and on the whole were spent reasonably.
@MrGrumblier
Your point that measuring a multitude of things gives some room for positive and negative spin has some truth to it. For example, digging into auxilliary data to discover a 10% increase in dental visits, which is barely above the noise level.
However, Pete didn't focus in some obscure and relatively meaningless statistic buried deep in the data in order to spin it - becoming poorer compared to the control group despite $35K of extra income is a first order and extremely salient effect which cannot be brushed aside as "spin". That's a pretty central result.
So I would not summarize that as "inconclusive".
I believe that OpenAI created and funded OpenResearch to conduct research like this, as relevant to their business interests.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade
First, who posed the hypothesis that $12K/year for 3 years would cause a substantial portion of the recipients to stop working entirely? That sounds like a strawman hypothesis which this research was not designed to answer. Increasing or decreasing work hours would be more relevant, but not central. Creating more or less household wealth would be a central outcome.
But if you gave them $60K/yr, the effect on employment might be a very different story. I don't see how you can conclude that a short term small subsidy not having much of some effect, implies that a long term large subsidy would also not have much of that effect.
The biggest common problem among UBI research is that people can be expected to behave differently if they know that a subsidy is going to be withdrawn in 1-3 years, after which you will need to earn all of what you spend again. For example, if you give up a job (if the subsidy is enough), it may be hard to get it back later when the experiment ends. If participants can expect to receive multi-decadal UBI, that might have very different outcomes. This short term focus applies to almost every study so far, and very much so to the Pandemic relief (which also has many other huge confounding factors!).
But the size of the subsidy would also be expected to have a non-linear effect. Would you quit your job if you were guaranteed 12K/year for life (assume inflation adjustment)? What about 60K? $90K? I would predict that a $60K/yr UBI would have much more than 5x the effect on willingness to work than a $12K, simply because it passes some thresholds where the balance shifts.
I am interested in exploring UBI for much the same reasons that Pete gives at the beginning of this video, but I am not willing to support a nationwide UBI until there is solid research; good intentions too often have undesired results. If UBI can be seriously shown to produce good results, I could full heartedly support it.
I'd like to see a study of a everyone already living in a county, say (ie: mixture of town and country) receiving a meaningful UBI for 20 years, guaranteed from the start (ie: funding pre-allocated and not revokable). Of course, it could be studied during that time, and would not need to wait for final outcomes - the long term guarantee in itself would affect even shorter term outcomes in ways that short term payouts would not. This could have both positive and negative effects compared to short term experiments, some of which could take years to develop, culturally or personally. (It would be interesting to also study what happens if the UBI is reduced or eliminated after such a long period, which could be required of a nationwide UBI in a major economic downturn some time in the future - how many people would be able to manage such a transition?)
Of course that would be very expensive - but a drop in the bucket compared to creating a UBI program for the entire country. Despite the downsides noted in this video, I think that UBI deserves a larger and longer term study (well, several of them).
Even worse, Open Research Labs is Y Combinator. Think Stripe, Coinbase, DoorDash, Airbnb, Instacart, DropBox, Twitch. If BiLliOnAiReS sAy UBI iS bAd, iT mUsT bE tRuE! 😂
@@SmallSpoonBrigade No, $1000 is NOT "a lot of money" in the sense that someone can live on it without working.
UBI: Terrible.
Automation with no UBI: War.
... *_WORRY_* 😬
Automation will never take all our jobs. We will always create new industries.
@@jhpjhunofc it will take our jobs. New jobs are not created but old jobs are replaced by machines. Our population is stagnating. Only reason the same didn't happen during the industrial revolution, is because of the population increasing fast.
@@jhpjhun While it is true that not all jobs can be automated, "we will always create new industries" seems like wishful thinking and pretty illogical. But even if I give you that, the short term consequences for the people that are affected can be catastrophic. Why should those people be happy that in 50 years, the decendants of their betters will struggle in new, creative ways to exploit and waste human life?
@@paro2210 Small nitpick, but in fact new jobs will be created as machines replace jobs. As people are still needed to upkeep or maintain the machines. If they are maintained by other machines, then those machines need to be maintained. McDonalds will be hiring robotics engineers.
@@SoaringMoon but that will be like 2 people replacing 20
1.3 hours less a week, compared to countries implementing a 4 day work week, lol.
Maybe people don't want to get rich, maybe they just want leisure time
The horror of that notion lmao.
Maybe people who are productive and make shit don't want to fund the leisure time of those who don't want to be productive?
and its not the job of everyone else to pay for their leisure time
@@ericorange2654 Tell that to the IRS
Lazy people make up the majority. That doesn't mean it's right.
COVID did EXACTLY this in Chile!!!! When the restrictions started being lifted, businesses (commerce, restaurants, etc) struggled to hire people. The people didn't want to work! Instead, by receiving the payments (government transfers + their own pension funds but before retirement), they started to buy cars, TVs, and random stuff. But they did not want to work NOR save money.
I have been a forensic Psych for 23, going on 24 years. This doesn't surprise me a bit. It would have when I was a young student but it doesn't now. Some people are motivated and eager to work for their future, delay that gratification for years to ultimately get ahead. Others simply aren't.
I think, the people that are educated, active in school and want to make their, and other's lives better are the motivated type and have a hard time realizing there are lots of people that are perfectly happy to scrape by doing the absolute minimum.
Some will kinda be forced to work to prevent becoming homeless and find that they do have more control over their lives than they realize. Those will climb out of poverty themselves.
Those that are not future oriented and don't want to do anything above the minimum are not going to change if you simply give them $1,000 a month. They aren't going to use that money to go to school. They aren't going to invest that money for the future. No, they will go for short term gratification. Some will cut back their work hours and party more, that's counter productive. Some will buy nicer cloths, eat out more, maybe buy a car but it won't be to get to work, it will be to impress others. That may make their life a little better but it won't get them out of poverty.
In extremely poor countries, that may be different but, in developed western countries, as tough as it may seem sometimes, those that are motivated, will generally do well long term.
Those that aren't motivated will not become motivated even if it's made easier for them.
Super surface level you should be asking deeper questions
I don't think you have any clue what proportion of people will behave in what ways. I know that personally I've achieved my most productive output when left alone for large periods of time, e.g. learning to code, writing applications, making and releasing music, and that I coast by and do the bare minimum in school and work environments because they're reliably unstimulating. If I had a way to reduce my hours at a job I feel contributes nothing to the world and steals my life life away, then I'd absolutely take advantage of it, and whenever I get those sorts of opportunities I use that time on productive, creative endeavors that are valuable to me.
@@johncasey9544 See, you are self motivated. You are kinda making my point for me. You are simply optimizing your time. Some people are perfectly happy doing virtually nothing productive. Productive doesn't necessarily mean a job only.
@@shananagans5 But from my perspective I have no reason to think that the majority of people are unlike me. What evidence do we have to go on here?
@@johncasey9544projecting your own personality onto others is a bias. Don't you think Somalian pirates or Hell's angels are a tad different from you?
So why aren’t trust fund kids poorer than their peers who don’t have that kind of inheritance?
Don't say the quiet part out loud...
Trust fund kids DO work fewer hours each week...
I imagine its just a lot more money
More importantly, why do you expect that turning the ENTIRE POPULATION into trust fund kids will result in the outcome you want? And where do you expect that money to come from?
Because social capital is more important than money.
A trust fund kid almost always has connections too.
Julius Caesar lived and died at the end Roman Republic not the Empire, which started with his adopted son Octavius. Please don't mix the two up 😭
@@RockyX123 the late Roman Republic was just as much an empire as the Russian Federation is today.
@@thomaskalbfus2005 The Roman Empire started with Octavian/Octavius/Augustus. Trying to conflate the Empire with a figurative use of the word 'empire' just makes you look ignorant and silly.
Maybe they we're overworked with no time off. They have no assets or liabilities. No time off,vacation or holiday pay for decades.Maybe child care, stay home to watch kids. Somethings are more important than money. Are they home owners or renters.
Julius Caesar didn't live in the time of the Roman Empire. It was a republic.
What's the difference on the ground? Are republic and empire exclusionary?
@@Apjooz it's a bit more significant than the difference between a Republic and a Democracy, which is always brought up when someone talks about the US being a Democracy. Do you push back to those comments?
@@ctrlaltdebug Back then republic and demoncracy were the same thing, one word is latin and the other greek and today they are not mutually exclusive which is why the people who claim US is a republic and not a democracy are the apex of ignorance. Also just cause it was called the roman republic doesn't mean it still was, just how north korea calles itself "democratic republic" right now
@@becausecontextmatters5260 No. Under Greek democracy, the eligible citizens voted directly for policies. In the Roman republic, the citizens voted for public officials who carried out policy, and only directly voted on certain important issues. The US founding fathers explicitly based the constitution on Rome for checks and balances against mob rule.
Julius Caesar was around for the civil war that ended the Roman Republic, but he was assassinated precisely because he was behaving like a monarch. His successor Augustus was the first emperor.
@@ctrlaltdebugJulius Caesar made himself dictator perpetuo, which is basically an emperor without calling himself an emperor. So just like in north korea as i mentioned, when you have a dictator for life, you're no longer a republic.
Also you're just regurgitating propaganda and you have no clue what the word "explicitly" means as pretty much everything you say is demonstrably false.
They drew upon philosophical ideals that were both common in greek and roman world but there was no distinction between republic and democracy at the time, pointing to organization is as silly as saying that any country who doesn't elect presidents through electoral college is not a republic. And rome had some norms but not a constitution that prevented "mob rule", whatever that is, cause i can bet real money you don't know either but keep repeating it like a parrot. Also constitution can be changed by a big enough mob so your argument is double dumb.
This is a very predictable result when you understand the people you are studying. The proponents of UBI tend to be financially literate people who aren't considering the financial literacy of the people who will be receiving the money.
The reality is that some people might see the opportunity and improve their situation, but most will take the money and become dependent on it.
More than that, they have very little understanding of second order effects. Humans react to incentives, and if you incentivize not working people won’t work. This idea that we are all productive members of society by nature is a huge fallacy
Which is completely wrong. If 1.4 hours a week less work constitutes dependency for 1,000 a week worth of income, then something very strange is going on. $1k a week is more than I was making at my last job, but these people are only cutting back by less than 2 hours and that's evidence of dependency?
The UBI has never depended on financial literacy of the recipients as part of the theory. People who earn a living wage aren't necessarily financially literate beyond being able to find work that allows them to pay the bills. They simply hire an expert or go to their financial institution and get advice there. If neither of those is the case, then they get books. People on a UBI are in more or less the same boat, they just don't necessarily have a job that pays all the bills.
Videos like this that are so completely wrong do nothing helpful in terms of advancing the progress towards a workable solution.
Well for us poor financially literate people it would help. How about a test? We pass it? We get cash. You fail it? You get referred to whatever hold your hand social security BS that exist for idiots that need it.
The obvious problem with this take is that UBI has shown positive results in other studies in less well-off countries (and a couple of developed ones, actually). For financial literacy to be the issue, you have to argue that people in the US are uniquely financially illiterate in a way that people from, say, Finland or Namibia aren't.
Dependancy isn't a bad thing, necessarily. I think it's important to understand that we've already been running the most successful BI campaigns in history for over 60 years. Social Security, Medicaid, and things like VA disability are all fundamentally the same concept as UBI, they just aren't "universal".
They discovered why Paris Hilton enjoys so much leisure time.
lol
boomer dated itself
Wouldn't UBI just increase wealth disparity? If the lower income group get lifted to the middle, then they all have the same amount of money competing for a similar basket of goods. Wouldn't this just increase the value of assets and make every basic good more expensive?
Reasons why dividend proposed in Social Credit is a better idea.
C.H. Douglas's dividend concept presents several compelling arguments for its implementation. Here’s a summary of the key points outlining its advantages:
### Moral Justification
- **Equitable Distribution**: The dividend acknowledges the contributions of previous generations and human inventions, ensuring that everyone benefits from societal advancements.
### Economic Ties
- **Linked to Economic Activity**: The dividend adjusts with economic fluctuations, potentially increasing as technology enhances productivity. This adaptability can lead to more substantial dividends over time it as well may drop if not enough productivity is achieved.
### Funding Mechanism
- **Not Tax-Funded**: Unlike traditional welfare programs, the dividend is not reliant on taxes, which can alleviate concerns about fiscal sustainability and government dependency.
### Debt-Free Structure
- **Compensation Mechanism**: By balancing incomes with prices, the dividend operates without incurring debt, promoting a healthier economic environment.
### Anti-Inflationary Properties
- **Indexed to Productivity**: Since the dividend is tied to productivity, it can help stabilize purchasing power and counteract inflationary pressures.
### Democratic Distribution
- **Universal Benefit**: The dividend is distributed across the entire population, enhancing collective purchasing power and fostering economic equality.
### Addressing Global Disparities
- **Mitigating Low-Cost Advantages**: By providing broader access to consumer products, the dividend helps level the playing field against the artificial advantages of low prices from lower-income countries.
### Complementary Mechanism
- **Compensated Price Mechanism**: For optimal effectiveness, the dividend should be paired with Douglas's compensated price mechanism, ensuring that prices reflect true costs while maintaining economic balance.
### Conclusion
Overall, C.H. Douglas's dividend model promotes social equity, economic stability, and a more democratic distribution of wealth, making it a potentially transformative approach to modern economic challenges.
I would like to remind everybody that the invention of the tractor directly led to the dust bowl tragedy of the early twentieth century
I appreciate the idea of lump sum version of UBI, which I hadn't heard before. If it had to happen at all, I suppose that method would be the one I would support. However, the primary reason I see UBI not solving any problems beyond the short term cannot be reflected in any of these studies. In all cases the rest of the state/country was NOT getting the UBI. This gave participants a relative advantage WITHOUT leading to inflation. If even at the state level this was implemented it would be eaten up by inflation within a few short years. So do we just keep increase the UBI amount to the point that inflation is so high that the only way anyone can support themselves is if they stay in the good graces of the government and don't get their UBI withheld for 'wrongthink?' This is a recipe for tyranny.
The inflation argument is wrong in principle. Inflation is caused by a mismatch between productive capacity and the money supply so if less people can do more, say with the help of AI then that should not only not be inflationary but your problem then becomes lack of people with money to spend. The debanking angle is worrying.
Printing money to pay people to not work is a recipe for inflation, not to mention, as you said, the possibility for abuse by the government. Self sufficient people are more resistant to government tyrrany, and no one is less self sufficient than someone who is paid by the state to not work.
@@markcarey67 I would argue that inflation is caused less by having fewer workers than money in circulation going toward wages than by simply having more money in circulation, regardless of whether the people get it by working or by handouts. You're simply able to use that 'productive capacity' shorthand now because working is currently the only way enough people get access to the money supply to have an effect on inflation!
It wouldn't lead to inflation because the driver of inflation is not the availability of money to the poorest but the effort by the richest to re-capture that money, which leads to both increased inequality and money-hoarding at the top. When those re-capture efforts are negatively reinforced by a progressive income and wealth tax that just transfers it right back to the poorest inflation simply doesn't occur. But yes, if you just print money without a progressive tax then you get inflation.
Inflation is often caused by rising wages, but if we live in a post-worker economy, where most jobs are offshored or automated by machines or AI, then inflation wont be such a problem.
They didn’t see all those stories about million dollar winners who went broke.. ? It's a matter of approach to money
I agree with this. I went from broke and in debt to having way more money than ever before by adjusting my behaviors.
Poverty is a behavioral issue, not an issue of economic system.
@@r.e.4873Poverty is not a behavioural issue when people are at the whims of their environment. Yes, even you. Some people aren't socialised as children, and this immediately sets them up for failure. They may or may not be abused, and are unlikely to have friendships, or even better able to form them. On the other hand, others are socialised, grow up in happy households, and even if they don't have that part they at least have friends, or at least have the personality to be a sycophantic hand-wringer. We haven't even discussed neurodivergence yet.
If mental illness is not the fault of the person, why is someone who doesn't have a support network, and is unable to obtain one because it requires community, denigrated for having been unable to improve their position alone? Some of the hardest workers, people much more hardworking than you, and much stronger than you, end up homeless. The tired line of ‘it is up to you to help yourself, no one else can’ is actually incorrect. For example, how does one cure loneliness? It inherently requires other people to consent to forming a genuine connection to you. This requires other people. How does one get a job? It requires somebody else to like your face, personality, and pick you even when you're most likely not the most qualified to apply. This requires the discretion of other people, and no matter what you do for your CV, you are beholden to the whims of employers. And what about an agoraphobic? All the success stories to that involve a trusted person sacrificing much of their own life to be with them through it, how does that come about?
There is no such thing as a self-made man, you were dependent on everyone who chose to validate your actions. This is an immediate disadvantage for anyone who isn't a psychopath, and for anyone who is simply ‘weird’ in a more benevolent way.
Lazy people are very rare. Most people you would call that are mentally ill. Or, in most cases, you recognise that you were lazy, and thus you think anyone else in a position that you DON'T understand (let me be clear on that) looks to be in a similar position as to what you were, and thus you conclude that they were just goofing around like yourself. Protip: they most likely weren't, and their life is just harder than yours.
And before you rant about some sort of childhood trauma you had, reread what I wrote and understand that it's literally an environmental lottery for whether or not one is given the tools to recover from it. It's not impressive to go from debt to plenty of disposable income if you're a normal person who is capable of making connections and got lucky with mental illness. Like literally just work and look for opportunities, it's pretty simple. Except it doesn't work like that for everyone even when they understand that, because society doesn't work like that, and if you haven't been an agoraphobic, abused, friendless autist in a place with underfunded social services, just for example, you wouldn't know a single bloody thing about getting out of it.
There are "other" stories about Lotto winners where the recipients of multi million dollar lottery wins decide to continue working their jobs until they retire. Most of these people don't particularly love their jobs. Their main reasons for continuing to work are that they would be bored and feel valueless without going to work each week. You don't hear about these winners so much, because it's not considered a particularly "newsworthy" story in our MSM's love affair with bad news all around 24/7.
Denver did a study where they gave homeless people rent money, a year later most of them were still homeless. Denver touted it as a success saying "we saved the city $500,000 on homeless services" but the study cost $10,000,000. A $9.5 million net loss to learn what we all already knew.
Free money will always simply incentivise a significant percentage of people to simply do less. Its human nature. Most people just want to stop, rather than do more especially if they're older. Nothing wrong with that desire but not it's not economically productive to give them that money. The only way I realistically see UBI type schemes working is to give an allowance claimable towards training which is weighted against them individually. They have to pay a certain amount towards it then the system pays the rest to make them invested. And not on anything, it has to be deemed valuable to get it. Anything free always gets abused.
So, how do you explain the incredibly small reduction in hours worked?
How is it not economically productive to give the poor money?
Poor people spend their money in the economy immediately.
It is actually tax cuts for the wealthy that are economically unproductive.
@@jamesphillips2285The wealthy use those tax cuts, to invest in business. This leads to better working conditions, wages, and more people being employed. To say tax cuts for the rich, only benefit the rich, is like saying taxing the poor, only hurts the poor.
@@sebastianlucas704 No they don"t.
Companies have been doing stock buy-backs instead investing in the business.
There have been mass layoffs as interest rates increase.
The wealthy are good at extracting money from the economy. They will get their investment money whether you give it to the poor or the rich. However if you give it to the poor: their living conditions will improve.
@@sebastianlucas704 Uh no, that's not what happened LOL. They spent it on stock buybacks. As productivity rose, they laid off people instead of hiring more. As a result, the wealthy got a LOT richer.
With all the layoffs in the tech sector, working conditions went to shit, and wages flatlined.
The premise of the study is flawed. The metric shouldn't be happiness but how sustainable your financial situation is.
Thing is, you're not gonna have much savings if you're paying for all the things you need to survive.
That's kind of the point.
Also, some of the metrics measured are silly.
I.e: The drug one. It doesn't measure addiction vs leisure. You could be a casual user and still be productive.
I think a UBI needs to be paired with strong insurance mechanisms. Most people are terrible at budgeting and saving for a rainy day, so don't expect them to. Pay them an amount per month that is basically what they should expect to spend that month, but than also have money available in case they hit an unexpected snag and need a bit more.
This was covered in the video. The people who received ubi had less assets/savings.
@@captainblacktail8137no it was NOT
@@feynmanschwingere_mc227011:54
You're kind of assuming that net worth versus time is still more important here or that if you do something with your time it is only valuable if it makes you richer. Orson Welles made a considerable net loss over his lifetime making films. He made most of his money on the side doing voice acting and spent it all on self financing his film projects. Anyone who is talented at impecunious pursuits could well end up with less net worth on paper under UBI but still better off.
better off by what metrics? personal ones that are completely irrelevant to any monetary pursuits?
do you even know what a "vanity project" is?
@@theX24968Z why is the health and enjoyment of life not enough reason on its own? how dense can you be, not everything needs to be about maximum efficiency towards getting the most monetary gain
@@chad2687 because both of those things are defined by standards that can be lowered and are easy to manipulate. progress cannot. progress not not consume more resources than it produces, causing others to suffer more than they would otherwise.
We tried UBI in 2020 during the pandemic. We gave people we didn’t let work PPP loans and FPUC payments for the three months minimum. All it did was cause frivolous goods purchased and created the massive inflation. Our way out of it has been to import the second/third world to create growth to compensate.
*lump sum UBI* would just increase the costs of any commodity in high demand from recipients. if companies know a customer can/ willing spend more money for a product: they are icentivised to increase prices. Take colleges for example: student loan debt keeps getting worse no matter how much money we throw at the problem.
a permanent, reusable assset, or service would at least leviate or raise the standard of living for the poor.
public bathing houses, basic shelter, free health clinics?
why not both?
In the long run, shouldn't we expect the increased prices to bring in more firms that produce the desired goods, driving the prices down through competition?
@@johncasey9544
No cuz printing money without increased productivity doesn't create new firms. It just devalues the money supply.
It makes the poor poorer and inflates the prices of assets and increases borrowing power of the ultra wealthy.
supposed to be universal but he immediately starts talking about poor people.
It's extremely fishy that this video doesn't link the paper. The paper seemingly appears in 9:03, but is almost impossible to read the title and search. I wonder, why on earth there's no link to the paper in the description?
Agreed: evavivalt.com/wp-content/uploads/Vivalt-et-al.-ORUS-employment.pdf
try to increase your resolution above 144p lol😂
@@Electruver Try to incrrase your social skill over EQ of -30.
Pretty sure EQ'ing won't fix your resolution? 🤔
@@ytsm Learn to read first then?
Those main takeaways highlighted at 16:40, the ones you considered secondary outcomes, were so much more interesting than everything you focused on.
People on UBI spent more on essentials and healthcare, had more time to actually enjoy their lives and gifted/donated what they had left over! That tracks with the other successful studies in developing nations, but the key difference is the society we live in.
Those who received UBI cared less about building their own wealth because they knew they could meet their needs. Why work more when you know you have enough?
UBI doesnt feed capitalism
UBI feeds capitalism. More or less every dollar handed to those people wound up being spent on something, hence the lack of growth in their wealth. That money then was able to circulate in the economy spurring growth.
The amount being handed out was neither enough per month nor long enough to expect to see much of anything. That's especially the case given that it was like 500 people in TX and 500 in IL that got the full money.
A longer study might have addressed what happens once the backlog of expenses is worked through.
Yeah, you’re just forcing everyone else to work more to support the additional consumption. Sounds sustainable.
To be fair I like the idea of UBI and even though I wouldn't mind having the money I wasn't totally convinced it was gonna work. I would much rather have Universal Healthcare than UBI.
The problem is simple: researches wanted UBI to "motivate" people to earn more and be more productive
But people wanted to live happier and healthier life
And that is why UBI doesn't work. It is a net negative in the big picture. Ideally it would increase productivity so that UBI can increase.
@@froniccruxis1049 But the fact people will be replaced by AI will make being more productive increasingly more redondant.
> "But people wanted to live happier and healthier life"
"Healthier" is straightforwardly wrong. "Happier" is extremely debatable.
The recipients spent more on healthcare, but their health outcomes did not improve. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, because all the RCTs on healthcare spending show that paying for people to use more healthcare causes them to use more healthcare, but does not improve their health.
The recipients also just spent a lot more money in general. So much so, in fact, that they accrued more debt, and ended up with $3k less in net wealth than the non-recipients. Most of that extra spending went into spending more than the control group did on food, housing and transportation - as in, they cooked less, ate more fast food, leased somewhat nice cars, and rented somewhat nicer apartments.
For all the variables that might hint at living a good and fulfilling life, let alone one with any kind of achievement or ambition, the recipients did no better than the non-recipients. They spent no more time with their families, they completed no more education, they started no more businesses, they wound up with no better health, etc.
If your idea of happiness is Pizza And Netflix Maximalism, then okay. Otherwise, no.
@@OptimalOwl while I see where you took data on "their health did not improve", I can't find in the report part about "No family no good food just netflix and junk". What I see is "weekly food expenditures and consumption of fresh vegetables, fish, and meat rise", or moms ow newborns more often eating outside of home (which is good, because moms of newborn babies should use ANY opportunity for rest). As for family there is data that "The category that rises most relative to the baseline level of spending is net gifts to family and friends". And I see exactly no mentions of how much time is spent with families.
@@Storytelless
> "I see exactly no mentions of how much time is spent with families."
Look at the various graphs on time use, e.g. Figures A1 through A5, on pages 67 to 71.
This is also what makes me think they spent more time doing non-productive, non-fulfilling solitary activities like Netflix. Notice how things like working, exercising, self-improvement, community engagement and caring for others are all separated out into their own categories, none of which increased. What does that leave in the "Self Care," "Solitary Leisure" and "Other Activities," which did increase?
> "No good food just Netflix."
The recipients spent more than non-recipients on food, without spending any more time on chores or hobbies (which is AFAICT where time spent cooking would be categorized.) What could that mean, if not eating out more and ordering more food?
I did not mean to imply that the participants all ate trash. I meant pizza as an example of a typical meal you order for delivery or takeaway, not as an example of a typical trash food. The recipients probably did not eat much more trash food than the control group, or else we'd be picking that up in the health outcome measures.
> "The category that rises most relative to the baseline level of spending is net gifts to family and friends"
On average, of the $1'000 per month, $22 per month went to gifts and to helping people out. IIRC, I think that also included things like donating to church and to charities. I can't locate that $22 figure in the text just now, but I remember reading it in there, and I'm seeing it in the stories reporting on the study as well.
We need to test negative income tax like Friedman wanted
word.
No, Friedman was wrong here. Unfortunate for someone who otherwise understood economics.
@@destroya3303 how was he wrong? Negative income tax is infinitely more efficient that the byzantine maze of US welfare system, as it uses the IRS bureaucracy that's already in place and is not going anywhere
Friedman wasn't really an advocate of UBI, he just said that reverse income tax was the least harmful way to do it.
Negative tax would actually work. If you subsidized more work and more achievement your society will work more and achieve more. If you subsidize laziness, your society will collapse into unbelievable inflation.
I wonder if it is correct for us to assume journalists should represent reality as it truly is?
If you mean journalists working at large corporations, I think you have to look at their business model to understand if that goal is even realistic.
Starbucks is huge because they figured out how to sell coffee to people who don't like coffee, but want to feel sophisticated.
The McNews model of your daily politics, entertainment, tech and sports is huge because, fundamentally, it tells people what they want to hear.
Most people want to hear that the government can cut people a check and make poverty go away.
I think independent creators who are passionate about a subject and funded by patrons can be more reality-based and tell us the good and the bad. But journalism that gets to the truth will probably always be a fairly niche business.
Lol!! Please say you're being facetious. Anyone who assumes "journalists" - whether legitimate or not - have any intention of representing "reality" as it truly is has already thrown away their most fundamental asset of independent and responsible thought and reason. Naiveté is deadly, to both you and others.
Journalism as a whole discovered long ago that actually _gaining_ infinite unchecked power was far more personally profitable than _speaking truth to power_ could ever be.
It is correct for us to assume they _should,_ and incorrect to _not_ assume that they _always deliberately won't._
Study Was Biased: No distributions of # children in family -vs- income is one glaring shortcoming.
UBI works here:
*) Raising 6 children w/high school education
*) Can now afford a car - the most coveted thing for the poor
*) Can can take a lower paying job that would prefer to have
*) Can stay closer to family, rather that relocate to make more money.
UBI doesn't work here:
*) Well to do, young people would gladly trade work for leisure - if I had 3 months off every year w/o pay, I'd have been a lifer engineer at Pratt & Whitney
9:53 ...I guess your not aware that people in the US already work waaaay too much? Like pay has remained largely stagnate since the 80's.
It's arguable that using free money to *not work* outside the home during the pandemic was the smartest use of the money; curious if they charted the death/illness rate from COVID among the two groups. I think you can't really judge this study given when it was conducted.
That is true. I kept working through Covid because I was afraid that it would be hard to find a job when everyone went back to work. I was wrong about that.
If you read the followup pinned comment, it was mentioned that "The study also measured this and found no improvements, not even a small improvement in physical health". So whether they tracked COVID-19 death/illness in particular they should still have found it it with what they did track.
@@tetyoonlee4373 Either way it's a strange situation, nobody was safe from being derailed by covid in one way or another.
Record inflation wiped out all the usefulness of keeping everyone home
If I had UBI, I'd just play video games all the time.
based
One giant flaw in the study: Guaranteed UBI for only 3 years is not a safety net that allows you the freedom to quit your job or the like, because there's no guaranteed income *after* 3 years.
For comparison, a homeless person costs society over $70,000 a year (UK govt report).
And migrants 450k ~
Such a statistic is useless. Individual homeless people would vary immeasurably in the costs they impose on society. A quiet person with mental disabilities who sleeps on park benches and deposits their trash in trash cans is not comparable with a person with a violent scofflaw who constantly commits vandalism, litters everywhere, and threatens the safety of the other citizens. Putting them both into one category is pretty unhelpful.
@@longiusaescius2537how would migrants cost so much more than homeless native homeless people. I mean I assume some of it is for processing. But that shouldn't make that much of a difference.
@@malcire migrants get free stuff, homeless don't
@@longiusaescius2537 if the homeless get nothing, how do they cost 70k a year?
Thing with AI is that ppl believe it will solve all problems.
When in reality, its only good for a few... a very few problems.
People used to think we would be living like the jetsons in 2000... tech has come a long way, but its not likely to come so far as to replace us.
The jobs we do and how we do them, will change. But we'll still be needed to get them done.
There is a section of the population that can only do manual labor. You can't educate them, it is just how they are. When the robots come, these people are unemployable.
The thing with AI - or any other form of automation, really - is that people believe that it will affect someone else, not them. AI isn't replacing less skilled or repetitive labor, that's already been done for decades. AI is replacing engineers and the like, who are far too bloated and dysfunctional already..
@@barbarakauppi9915 ai is just nerual networks that try to figure out how to best solve a problem using learning but ofc its way oversimplification but in short it's still just a computer program of yes/nos but on a spectrum/scale that can weight an answer towards yes or no and make decisions based on that. So no it will not replace people it is as good as the data you put in it but will automate the more cumbersome tasks that are mind numbingly boring or repetitive.
@@barbarakauppi9915 Of cause it affects everyone.
Just like tractors being used affected everyone, via the quality of food produced.
My point is AI could never take all the jobs. Its not some be all and end all thing.
A lot of people that would have become farm hands, ended up doing desk jobs.
The work force is still there, jobs are still needed. But the work changes each time tech grows.
Farm hands went from a very physical job to a more technical one. From working in open space, to a small cubical.
End of the day, the jobs may be different, but people are still needed to do them :/
I suspect the majority of jobs with shift in skill, as AIs need more power and speed, its likely electricians and builders will be needed to update things, such as laying fiber optic cable...
Perhaps programmers will need to learn some 'less skilled or repetitive labour' and help to dig the trenches to lay cables in :P
@@barbarakauppi9915 one of the main jobs that engineers do is replace repetitive labor. if you automate engineers, you automate everything, eventually.
UBI works better with people with financial literacy and discipline. The US in general kinda lacks both
We have structured our welfare system to punish anyone who tries to make money. It's only purpose is to keep people poor and unemployed.
Nonsense, UBI works with or without financial literacy. People can either hire an expert or get advice at their bank/credit union if they don't have the financial literacy. And, it's never been about discipline, there's entire industries setup to make it expensive to be poor. Things like grocery stores and check cashing fees mean that the poor outright have less to work with to begin with.
Yo, what happened? This wasn't the plan,
Gave you the tools, thought you'd make a stand.
Cash in your hands, time to invest,
But you clocked out early, just chasing rest.
This wasn't for lounging, for kicking your feet,
It was for rising, for making ends meet.
Now you're back where you started, maybe worse-
Man, this was supposed to break the curse.
Deindustrialized, debt-based consumerism is collapsing.
It was never sustainable. Mega corps endless greed was never sustainable.
They said the Consumer Economy would be great!
@@pctrashtalk2069 No spending money, no consumers!
@@pctrashtalk2069consumption works, but as long as people are consuming value adding things. If people are consuming VR and pc games all day, then that kind if consumption will ruin the nation. But if people are consuming BMWs, Mercedes, apartments like Switzerland is doing, than that consumption will lead into insane prosperity. But to consume, you need to work.
Maybe I'm just misremembering my Econ courses, but I would think that anytime you give people money without getting something in value in return, inflation is always the result.
I DON'T CARE IF I'M POORER.
I want UBI so I can do what I love before I exit this mortal coil. It's like people don't understand anything beyond money, it blows my mind.
I don't think 3 years is enough for this to reach full effect.
I think it's like this:
People have to settle into their new reality of having that 1000 more. Then, after settling, they will be content for a while. And THEN they start wanting more.
Honestly, if I'd know I'd receive 1000 per month for 3 years, I'd not change anything on my life. I'd slowly buy, replace and repair all the things I need to and save the rest for when the 3 years end. Maybe I'd temporarily stop working extra because I temporarily have enough. It's like a mini vacation that has a very clear start and end date, and that in itself already screws over the study. What do people expect to happen? That someone learns they get 1000 more per month (which isn't much, let's face it) and they immediatelly go and put it into some form of education (which can, per location, be a lot more expensive) and at the end of 3 years they have to have finished that education/training or whatever and then find a way to put it to good financial use, when most employers rather not employ a more trained person for a job a less trained person can do?
3 years isn't even a prologue. A very deep change in mindset has to happen before the goal is reached. Try the study over 50 years.
I find it interesting that what makes people different isn’t the money but the attitude TOWARDS that money.
This reminds me of a video that explained how medieval English peasants worked. In short: they only did as much as required to live in reasonable comfort and avoided work as much as possible. What did they do instead? Leisure... after they finished their household chores of course.
They worked so little because if they worked more they would die otherwise. They had to plan and be ready for winter and had save the money they got so they could afford stuff through winter. Winter was the biggest killer of the poor.
They really had no option to increase their financial position. The margins were thin. If you worked twice as many hours you might make 2% more. Whereas in modern society there are opportunities to make 500% more if you work harder.
So if a person doesn't provide "productivity" in a strictly economic way, then they are useless? This guy has no creativity, imagination, or the ability to understand what makes people "humans". Here's a hint: it's not working at a job. Just spun a bad study into how he wanted to see it. That's really pathetic.
C.H. Douglas dividend is better from all perspectives because:
-morally right to give people the share from previous generations coming from human inventions for the improvement of human societies.
-it is tied to economic activity so it can go up and down however the more technology uses an economy the more the dividend will rise.
-not funded from taxes.
-debt free since it compensates incomes with prices along another mechanism.
-antinflationary for being indexed to productivity.
-democratical because it spreads over the entire population the acquisitive power.
-the artificial advantage of lower prices of products coming from low income countries is reduced since people have access to a broder range of consumer products and are able to cover the cost of salaries in their own countries.
-it must be applied with the compensated price mechanism also proposed by C.H. Douglas
If your neighbour was on UBI, and spent his time painting, going to theater, going to bars, retired mode, would he consider himself useless? no. Is he useful to you?
Listing Friedman's negative income tax plan as a sort of UBI completely misses the point. He wasn't suggesting negative income tax as a form of UBI but rather a replacement for the assortment of social welfare programs already in place. One that didn't disincentivize people to go find work as much as the existing ones do. And as an added benefit it would make minimum wage a moot point so we could get rid of that as well.
What was their quality of life, their happiness?
if they are spending more on leisure and less work, were they happier?
$1000 worse off does not necessarily mean worse. because a happier person does help in terms of health. This would thus be more interesting to see in a place like UK or Australia where healthcare is less of a problem.
fair enough
Their leisure time is being funded off the backs of people who are working harder and being taxed more. It's fundamentally immoral to take from someone who works hard to give to someone who doesn't.
And you just demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of UBI, as well as how it would be funded.
UBI is universal, it applies to everyone. some of those in the study would have been wealthy and paying more tax than others. in fact, it may be possible some were multimillionaires. UBI does not discriminate based upon your wealth or taxes paid.
Next is your lack of understanding of how a UBI is funded. Governments literally make money. A UBI would be funded by the government just producing more money. It is not funded by taxing people more as this defeats the entire purpose of UBI.
@@Kitkat-986 just like the leisure time and wealth of billionaires is founded on hard barely compensated labour of their employees you mean
@@KateeAngel UBI won't be funded by billionaires. Billionaires are notoriously hard to tax, if it were easy, there wouldn't be any billionaires. Even if the government went to every billionaire and held them at gunpoint for their bank account details, that amount of money simply wouldn't be enough to fund UBI. UBI is a colossal expense. Just a basic 1k per month for every citizen would require over 25% of the entire US economy dedicated just to funding UBI, not counting the administrative and procedural costs, which with government tends to more than double the cost of any program.
Practically speaking, to implement just a basic 1k per month UBI would cost the entire current budget of federal government and the entire budget of every state government combined to fund it. About half of the entire current GDP would go to funding UBI. It is economcially completely unfeasible.
I would like to say thay the likelihood of AI replacing everyone in 5 years is very unlikely and extrapolates from a relatively linear increase in its abilities which is likely going to reach a cap, especially when it requires a lot of people to be able to figure out the problems of AI and I requires everyone to agree to it, which they aren't because noone wants the AI to diagnose and treat you with a pneumonia when you could have cancer
Remember when the tractor put everyone out of work in the agrarian society? Yeah, me neither. It will be like every other technology, a force multiplier. More people work in the car industry now than ever despite robots. We just have VASTLY better cars.
@@jasongrundy1717
Nobody knows what will happen. 10 years ago LLMs of today were considered 50 years away. AI benefits from a steady increase in compute available, but sudden algorithmic and training improvements also happen, like GPT o1.
I do not like historical comparisons in the case of AI. It's the first technology which can, at least in principle, make its own decisions. That's not a "force multiplier" or a "tool". That's another species. Of course, current systems are bad at long term planning, continuous learning and the like, but there are hundreds if not thousands of people working on these problems.
AI is just algorithms and pretty dumb ones. Computers can do some things much faster than us, but some things they can't do at all
@KateeAngel Computers are basically like a five year old. If you want it to dobsomething useful, they need a how to guide for dummies to do it. AI is just moves computers to the preteen years. They know just enough to get in trouble without being supervised. But atleast you dont have to break it down barney style at em as much.
10:00 - so, the people with UBI had more time for themselves, and that is somehow bad?
And you also expect them to spend money on networking? How?
Also, what education can you buy for 1000 USD a month where the study was conducted while also working? Also, how would that paid education be useful? Do you have zero experience with job searching?
I am asking these questions as somebody who both studies on one's own (and has a degree) and has been fortunate enough to get a high-paying job after suffering through the job-searching process.
17:00 - the fact that more people get to access necessary healthcare is not significant? What? Are you this deep into net worth worship that you decide to ignore people being able to access basic needs that should be fulfilled as basic human rights?
Is easy people don't have incentive to work so they don't. Have enough people to do this and all collapse. Is common problem in comunist countries with devastating results.
The idea is that if it is successful, there should be an increase in net worth. If you look at this plan long term, if everyone became LESS financially independent and healthy, there is a mess. People end up needing more. This $1000 has to come from ✨somewhere✨ (it comes from people who would be working). If there needed to be an increase, the increase would come from people who work. And so on. Long term, people work because we need those jobs. If there are less and less hours being worked on regular jobs, those industries cease to exist or cease to be able to serve the population (people were upset about their favorite places or services having reduced hours or closing after workplaces were struggling to find people to hire after covid). These jobs will be filled by AI, when possible. Then no one gets to work. Yes, having more personal time and going to the dentist is a positive thing. However it’s disingenuous to present them as if they outweigh the very real negatives of what this would do to everyone.
If your concern is “what can you even buy that would be useful (like education) with $1000 in the US??” That’s a great question. Probably not much. How much should they be getting?? $5000 a month? $10,000 a month?? How are we going to be able to afford that? The hope would be that $1000 could give people enough cushion to do things that would make improvements on their socioeconomic position. But it didn’t work, understandably. Because it doesn’t make much sense. So now what?
What exactly is your lifestyle like? I've lived on $1000 month.
@@Gromkiii
'Is easy people don't have incentive to work so they don't.'
Lol. 'They don't have incentive'.
Also, they literally kept working.
'Is common problem in comunist countries with devastating results'
HAHAHA.
You have no clue about how countries with communist governments worked/work.
Communist revolutions, wherever they succeeded, consistently managed to massively improve people's lives. Compare late Russian Empire with the USSR, as well as post-Soviet Russia with the USSR.
@@LiterallyJustAnActualPotato
'The idea is that if it is successful, there should be an increase in net worth'
Why?
'This $1000 has to come from ✨somewhere✨ (it comes from people who would be working)'
Money circulates in an economic system. It doesn't 'come from people who would be working'.
Furthermore, the richest people in the world in general and in the US in specific do not work. They instead earn most of their income through ownership.
'If there needed to be an increase, the increase would come from people who work'
Not necessarily. You could also redistribute wealth from the richest people who do not work.
In general, you have a very childish perception of economics. I recommend you read something about macroecon.
The point of UBI isn’t to eliminate poverty. The point of UBI is to have a failsafe for society when Ai is competent enough to replace jobs. There’s still layoffs in the tech sector and being replaced with nothing. That’s a lot of high paying jobs gone.
22:50 Enjoying life comes before "improving your human capital" in my opinion.
Yes I agree so much. I’m really disappointed in his flagrant disregard for humanity. It’s genuinely dystopian the way he is sad over people being able to have more leisure time.
Surprise human nature can’t be beat with social engineering schemes.
What, that you get poorer with more money?
Negative income tax is just corporate welfare.
@@leggysoft
Corporate welfare is already legalized by political bribes, lawyers and legislators that cut tax laws for Big Corps.
This is why the Fair Tax is what's needed to repeal Amendment 16.
What?
@@leggysoft
If there's such a thong as corporate welfare it is due to the bribed welfare recipients in Congress and not the illegal theft of income which is by
definition slavery.
Negative income tax is UBI.
Universal Basic Income and I rather the Fairtax to be law that would repeal and replace Amendment 16.
No tax on income, tips, food, healthcare or property owned.
@@Kyrnsword you should become a walmart lobbyist, they spend a lot trying to get the state to support their underpaid employees
Friedman's proposal was associated with work in that the "negative income tax" was paired with income from a job not just a UBI check.
My own anecdote was the extreme poverty is a greater motivator than any form of ambition or outside encouragement.
I worked harder and longer to get out of it. Animals tend to work enough to meet their needs. A jaguar doesn't spend energy hunting when it isn't hungry. Birds stop with one nest because two would be a waste of energy. Humans aren't much different. Give them a place to stay and enough food to get by, and the largest motivators go away.
No idea who these 1000 participants were but if my family received an extra $1000 a month, that would have an improvement to our financial situation and net worth.
What is so wrong with leisure activities? Can't we just exist sometimes without making someone else money? Seems like the study showed that people in a stable financial system who got the free money chose to make less money over their own happiness. Like cmon man, stuff like being able to go to the doctor or dentist, (you chose dentist I'd assume cuz it just sounds less good and has a smaller percent change) is very important for PEOPLE. I really don't care what my net worth is if I'm healthy and happy and I think that is what most people want as well. The economy is not everything and numbers in a bank account are made up.
Net worth has a massive effect on your happiness and health if you are poor enough to need UBI.
@@cooledcannon sure, we all need money so we can eat, afford do go to the doctor and dentist to take care of our health, and do things that give us purpose. I'm saying why is using money to improve your life instead of grinding for a system that doesn't work for you a bad thing? If I had enough money to live relatively comfortably every year I would definitely spend it to get more time with family and friends instead of just working more
@@peanutreviews9396 It's not bad. What is bad is becoming poorer when given UBI. That is what is surprising. We need to figure out what is going on.
@@cooledcannon so they aren't making as much money. But is their quality of life worse? I don't think simply looking at earnings is the best way to determine whether this is good or not. From what I saw in this video, quality of life was improved, but the UA-cam man discounted this and instead yapped about the numbers in their bank accounts. The UA-cam man said that spending money on these things was not good which is why I'm arguing against it, if you agree with me on that then great!
@@peanutreviews9396 What you are saying is true if they are merely earning less. However, they are becoming poorer. Like, if I took the money from UBI and spent it on QOL I would not become poorer. Something is making me drain money from other sources or something.
This means you seriously have to look into the study and why.
If you don't, and the mechanism holds, what this means is if you do a lot of UBI you make those people poorer. The poverty will make the quality of life worse if you don't figure this out. The idea behind UBI is to fight poverty so it's crucial to get this right.
Actually COVID proved that UBI works and brought many people out of poverty during that time
You should google that before you open your mouth.
Rampant inflation and a complete collapse of the supply chain, yeah, Covid was great! 🤦♀
it was the biggest wealth transfer from the poor to the rich in known history.
@@PaulB-q3d He said UBI worked, not that COVID was beneficial, learn to read before climbing mount stupid
Well if there are no jobs to be gained. Why does it matter if people train for skills or not. If I can't train for something I like. I will just focus on the other things I like even more. I. E. Everything else beyond working (which if I did not need the money to live, I would not do anyway). Give me leisure everyday of the week if I did not have to do shit work for pointless managers (which it seems won't have jobs either and don't have useful skills beyond that which makes them managers.). But then again, with 1000 dollars a month extra on top of what I earn now, I would also start working less, but I would go and train in datascience and statistics. One of those jobs that will dissappear according to you. Or I would study some other statistics based field. But I would still only study something I like. I am wasting away on a pointless prospectless job now anyways. One I still have 30000 in study debt for. So if I get another chance. I would not waste it on something that I do not like.
I just don't want to lose $1000 more per month to taxes. That would easily be enough to push me over the line of losing my apartment, or else getting a second job to survive.
@@Kitkat-986 yeah bereaucrats are one of those hurdles why it would not work in heavily bureaucratized countries. Which are pretty much all the western countries. With such an idea as UBI, it would require a serious overhaul of many rules that exist now to keep the capital in the hands with most capital. Those who would need UBI the most are always those who suffer the most with how taxation rules are set up. I would also get in serious trouble if 1000 moreon my bank account would mean that I would go into a higher tax rate, which would also mean I would no longer have a right at the rental that I have now. And because everyone get 1000 more. Prices will go up everywhere, the already very expensive rent-seeking parasites would become even more expensive, which in the end would mean no one would actually gain much. The same happens when salaries are raised systematically. In the end inflation will become worse which in the end would mean no one actually gains much if anything.
@@emiel89 The core issue is that socialism doesn't work, and socialists are too stupid to understand why. Mouse traps work because mice don't understand why the cheese is free.
We moved production to the 3rd world.
Note: In this trial the basic income was "gifted". This is not how basic income is normally framed.
11:45 "renting instead of owning and/or being in perpetual debt is bad" what a revolutionary new concept, never heard of this before...
Renting versus owning winds up being more complicated because people move around more for jobs and if you own, then you're stuck either selling it when you move or figuring out how to rent it while you're away. So, you greatly increase the possibility of being trapped in an area where economic opportunities are going away if that's what's happening in the area versus just renting.
Really, with how the economy has been changing, there shouldn't be so much emphasis on owning as a pathway to wealth as it's just not realistic for most young people these days.
owning is just renting from the bank xD
Lately my argument for UBI has been that people working below the poverty line are actually subsidizing their employers: because they are not able to refuse work without dire consequences.
This is even made explicit when we learn that many Walmart and McDonald's workers rely on foodstamps to survive.
If you want to tie it into a Land Value Tax (georgism): companies take from the commons by monopolizing land. It is fair for the government to tax that land and redistribute the proceeds through UBI.
"subsidize poverty and it will decrease" -somehow actual economists
link the study
It only failed if you don't care about people's well-being. What you're not considering is the increase in labor from machines. A world where machines replace workers, there will be incrasingly less need for human labor.
Having poor relatives, I could have tell you exactly why UBI would fail. These people worked harder to get as much money as they could from the government rather than maintain a job. They would spend all of their money within days of getting it on frivolous things, and had no ability to consider savings, investment, or personal responsibility. You cannot just give people money and expect them to use it wisely.