No. The reason you say that is because you're young and you believe what you've heard. You will soon cease to be the former and then presumably, likely, stop to do the latter. People want to work, they want to be useful. And yes, if I support you but threaten to stop supporting you as soon as you get to work for money—suddenly working for money looks less attractive. Sure, natural. There's nothing wrong with that. But if I support you no matter whether you add money to that yourself, then that is not detrimental to your willingness to work, it just gives you that much more leeway to choose a suitable occupation.
This is YCombinator's blog after all, isn't it?
No, most people work because that's the only way they get food on the table and survive, not because of some hilariously out of touch notion of menial work being fulfilling
As practiced, capitalism is just high stakes musical chairs. Everyone, rich and poor, works fervently to ensure they aren't the last ones standing with no chair. UBI asks: what if everyone always has a chair?
Its a very unsettling question, one can almost hear the record scratch when its posed. So unsettling, we start asking who deserves a chair!
And suddenly we're not talking about capitalism OR UBI at all. This is something else entirely: class. The allegedly unwashed lazy hordes versus the Ultra Clean Society of the Diamond Shower Faucets.
The primary incentive for anyone to work (as we understand the term today), is to maintain food and shelter above all else. That's it. Proponents of UBI want everyone to have food and shelter, be less of a slave. Opponents worry about whether we can afford to give everyone a chair.
So you agree that "the problem with welfare today is that its a disincentive to work"?
I live in the UK. Currently my marginal tax rate is something like 65% because for every £100 I earn, I pay 40% income tax, 12% national insurance, 9% student loan (which functions more like a tax here than a real loan), and I lose something called child benefit when I earn more.
So yeah, I want to earn more, but it's pretty marginal returns for the extra work, stress and responsibility until I've totally lost child benefit (lost totally at £80k) and then I start to keep more of the income again. And then at £100k you lose the government support for childcare, you start having to pay interest on all savings accounts, and so between £100k and £120k you can be worse off than before rather than better off, especially if you have multiple children.
That's not to say that the incentives are the same on the low end of the salary scale but you can see why people might think it.
i don’t think that is a bad thing necessarily but i think we can be relatively confident of the empirical reality of the effect (at least in the short-term) for quantities of money like this?
Good thing they had the participants complete a time journal so we can see that it mostly went towards leisure time and socializing. Again, I'm not making a moral judgement here - for a similar amount of money relative to my salary I would also shift towards more leisure at the margin.
> I don’t think I’d draw a lot of conclusions
The point of the experiment is precisely so we can draw generalizable conclusions about how money around this quantity impacts people's behaviors/incentives. Many welfare programs offer similar quantities of saving.
I think your reasoning is a bit motivated - this is a pretty good social science experiment that was very careful to preregister their analysis.
If you code for 100 hours a week, and I code for 40 hours a week, who's working more? We care about the productivity, not the hours worked.
(1) look up the definition of "disincentive". The parent didn't say anything about people not wanting to work or not wanting to be useful. And even then, you actually agreed about it being the disincentive ("if I support you but threaten to stop supporting you as soon as you get to work for money—suddenly working for money looks less attractive").
(2) understand the meaning of the phrase "The problem with X today is Y". It's very clearly not saying that Y is a problem with X, in fact, it's implying that there are other approaches to X that don't have problem Y.
