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0 pointsmytailorisrich3mo ago0 comments

Unemployment benefit is to help you while you are out of job _involuntarily_ and while you look for a job, not to subsidise your lifestyle or aspiration to find your dream job. It's not about "patriarchal bureaucracy", whatever that might mean.

There is actually a moral aspect here. Morals in society is that you work to earn your own living and that you don't abuse kindness.

> This is not testing "unemployment benefits", it is testing UBI

No, this was testing a sort of UBI vs traditional unemployment benefits based on the two groups:

"The other group got it conditionally, with requirements to look for work, report to unemployment offices, and satisfy bureaucrats. And the money went away with employment."

That's unemployment benefits.

Again, it is obvious that the group who got money with no strings attached felt better, this does not tell us anything. It sounds like a contrived study that aims to prove that "UBI is better".

> your trivial "who gets a job fastest (any job, no matter how ill-suited or temporary)",

It's not trivial, it is the key metric. Granted, you could combine it with the "quality" of the new job that would also be useful, but since this is all to help people while they are looking for a job any studies and experiments must measure the impact on that otherwise there are missing the point.

Frankly I don't understand this cultish attachment to UBI its proponents tend to have.

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Kim_Bruning3mo ago

I think there's a big cultural split on morality here.

A lot of people think that a supermarket with self-check out would probably be empty within the day, with people trucking off their goods in every which direction. Maybe in some places that's actually still how it works. This supposes that morality is mostly extrinsic (low trust society).

Throughout quite a bit of the West, Europe , Finland we're dealing with high trust societies these days. In these countries, all said and done self checkout is actually netto cheaper to run than manned checkout, and that includes shrinkage. (Above some point) every penny spent on checkout counter operators is wasted. So -at least in Finland-, morality is mostly intrinsic (high trust society).

If you tell this story to a person from a low trust society, they'll think you're pulling their leg. Every man, woman, and child to themselves, right?

Meanwhile, in high trust societies like Finland, it's just Tuesday: 'Bleep... bleep'.

Now when it comes to people with intrinsic morality: Making them go through extra procedures might actually slow them down; Hiring extra people to keep an eye on them can go negative yield.

There's more to be said on this, but the key intuition is that much of western thinking on morality is still calibrated on extrinsic morality, while many westerners are now actually being raised with intrinsic morality. It's a slow cultural change.

+ see also: Dan Pink: Drive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

beardyw3mo ago

,> There is actually a moral aspect here. Morals in society is that you work to earn your own living and that you don't abuse kindness.

That is true, but it leaves out the question of who's morals we are discussing. If the recipient is not under any obligation, and yet gets a job, that morality is played out in them.

If the person is under obligation and gets a job as a result, their moral position is unknown but likely unchanged

Or perhaps we are talking about wanting other people to live out our morality?

mytailorisrichOP3mo ago

In this case society is paying (out of moral principles) so this gives it a fair right to set the moral expectation or just the practical one.

Let's say someone does not get a job. Are they looking for one and being unsuccessful or are they just cashing their benefits?

Checks are needed in practice unless it can be shown they are not (what I suggested in my previous comments).

nothrabannosir3mo ago

Sure, in a world where you can effortlessly make that work without waste or moral lossage through faceless bureaucracy on the enforcing side, that seems like a great model. E.g. a parent setting some rules around a large monthly stipend for a child: the humanity remains, it’s efficient, the morality of “if you want money you have to do something for it” can be preserved without incurring larger moral costs like “you don’t understand the circumstances”, and maybe/probably efficiency can actually be improved.

as far as I understand this entire conversation around ubi, that ideal isn’t the issue. Proponents rather hold that you cannot scale this to a society without the cost exceeding the benefit. The bureaucratic machine to sustain these rules inevitably becomes soulless, expensive, inefficient, and counter productive. Is the argument.

It’s not that we shouldn’t, it’s that, at scale, we can’t. Is the argument :)

I don’t think your statement on morals is necessarily incompatible with the practical considerations offered by others. It’s a different conversation.

toss13mo ago

You keep claiming there is a moral problem with giving people enough of a basic stipend to actually live out of the gutter.

In the richest most affluent society in the history of the planet.

In a society where it is organized so a handful of people control more than 50% of the society's wealth, and it is also organized so the minimum wage has stripped is no longer even sufficient to work FULL TIME and get above the poverty line. In a society where a family owns the largest employer in the country and sits on $Billions of wealth while they pay so little that a substantial number of their employees qualify for food assistance.

Who is freeloading, the billionaire owners taking massive tax breaks and paying less than their office workers, or the minimum-wage laborer who must "take" government assistance in addition to his pay merely in order to not starve?

A society can rightly be judged by how it treats it's lowest members.

A moral affluent society would organize itself so every single person has a minimum of food, housing, healthcare, and education, even if a few were freeloading.

Instead, you attempt to justify refusing to feed and house people because a few might freeload. Or, if not refusing, to implement massive government bureaucracies, which 1) are both costly and 2) are proven to make worse outcomes and 3) are even more easily defrauded, merely to make sure all the lowly workers who cannot get a leg up are suitably shamed and monitored, lest they receive just a little too much.

And do not start on how some will waste UBI it on alcohol or drugs. The rich also waste their lives in the same way.

While you stand on your moral high-horse, you argue for the most immoral actions.

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onraglanroad3mo ago

There is absolutely no physical difference between someone on benefits living from your work and a billionaire living off your work.

Well, except you have to contribute a lot more of your time to support the billionaire lifestyle than the benefits one.

The legal difference is who owns some bits of paper but there is no physical difference in the work you do.

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