> The findings suggest that basic income doesn’t seem to provide a disincentive for people to work.
Do they? The findings suggest that a monthly stipend with an established expiration date doesn't provide a disincentive for people to work.
But the policy that this experiment is supposed to bolster--a real UBI--is a guaranteed monthly payment for life. I'm not convinced that these temporary experiments--in which the participants would be fools to 'retire', since the payments are temporary--are any indication of how people would behave when given a a real UBI.
It's impossible to fully prove a negative (e.g. prove this code has no bugs, prove there isn't a teacup hiding behind mars), but each study gives us tentative confidence to do larger and larger studies.
If we really are nearing an automation revolution which requires us to become a demand-constrained society, then we will want to understand how people behave with UBI.
If not, then it's still good to understand the nature of unconditional cash transfer programs (even if temporary), for scenarios like the pandemic in the US or as an alternative to other forms of aid in developing economies.
Who said they need to prove a negative? I'm saying these guys are citing a study about apples while making claims about oranges.
They studied the impact of a temporary stipend. Yet the title of the article ("Universal basic income seems to improve employment and well-being") is not a claim about the impact of temporary stipends. It is a claim about UBI.
You cannot honestly infer anything about UBI or the incentives created by UBI from a study of something that is fundamentally different than UBI.
I agree that the results of the study should give us confidence to do larger studies. If studies of UBI result in the same findings, it would likely win me over to the pro-UBI camp.
But for now, I find it irksome that the article claims a study of apples has taught us something about oranges.
I guess the article should be called "2 year unconditional cash transfer program to 2000 people seemed to improve employment and wellbeing".
But I disagree that this doesn't allow us to infer anything about UBI. It tells us something about unconditional cash transfer over a 2 year period, which is a subset of UBI. Baby apples, if you will.
There are of course other facets that aren't tested here, like the duration of the study not being a lifetime, or the fact that not everyone in the society is getting it, or the taxes not manifesting.
Ultimately, no study can fully prove the duration effects of UBI in a useful amount of time. We could do lifetime studies and we still wouldn't know about multi-generational effects. And we could do multi-generational studies, but do we really have 200 years?
---
That said I agree longer term studies are a good idea, maybe 5+ years which would give people time to do career changes. That this study has worked out hopefully gives someone justification to undertake the next.
I'm cautiously in favour of UBI, but this is such a flimsy study and there's absolutely no reason to think these results generalize to an entire country of people being offered UBI permanently.
These sorts of articles where they claim to have scientific evidence that UBI helps just feels sleezy and disingenuous. I doubt something like this would ever change the mind of someone who is skeptical of the idea, and might actually have the opposite effect.
> These sorts of articles where they claim to have scientific evidence that UBI helps just feels sleezy and disingenuous.
Why? This article states what they did, and what the results were. Hardly sleazy, unless, of course you have a predefined axe to grind against UBI as the results certainly show no significant negative effect. Claimed "disincentives" are part of the anti-UBI talking points much like they were in the "oppose raising minimum wage" talking points. In both of these cases, the claimed negative effect has never appeared.
In addition, UBI seems to have an especial effect on families with children, and that should absolutely be followed up. It probably indicates that families with unemployed members are less likely to be there due to inherent issues like drug addiction and mental health and more likely to be there due to path dependence (teen pregnancy--for example).
For those of us who are pro-UBI, this is a welcome study but hardly definitive. In addition, since UBI experiments are always severely limited in scope in these trials, it may be more effective to target families to get the most benefit.
As always in these situations, I ask what experiment and evidence would you accept that UBI works? Being dismissive is different from being a skeptic. A skeptic also has an experiment and hypothesis that could disprove their position. If you don't have a position that can be disproven, you're just an annoying gadfly.
I want to re-iterate that I'm in favour of UBI. I can imagine there are potential pitfalls to UBI, but I think those pitfalls are not as dangerous as the alternative. I really do think we should have some form of UBI (though I don't think it would be a panacea).
I just think that there isn't actually anything meaningful to be learned from this study about how things would play out if we implemented actual UBI.
The reason this doesn't tell you anything is that economies are strongly interacting systems, and humans are tricky test subjects. If you give a couple thousand people a couple years of money, that's a very different situation than an entire country of people being promised that money forever.
People against UBI worry that it'd cause people to quit their jobs or be lazy. Who is going to quit their job to live off UBI if they know the money will dry up in two years? Furthermore, one might be concerned that even if the first generation of people to get UBI treat it responsibly, what if the next generation who grows up taking it for granted don't treat it responsibly?
One could play this game all day where people who are against can come up with rationalizations for why the results of the study don't scale and people who are pro-UBI can come up with reasons why it would scale.
> As always in these situations, I ask what experiment and evidence would you accept that UBI works? Being dismissive is different from being a skeptic. A skeptic also has an experiment and hypothesis that could disprove their position.
That's exactly the problem. I'm not sure a small scale study is actually capable of showing that UBI works or doesn't work. I worry that the only way we're going to find out is actually implementing it.
> If you don't have a position that can be disproven, you're just an annoying gadfly.
Again, I'm pro-UBI. I just don't think that people's claims about UBI can be proven or disproven without it actually being done at scale, both in terms of the number of people given money and the length of time the money is provided.
I'm a physicist. I'm not anti-science. However, I am against the mis-use of science in performing experiments that cannot show what they aim to show.
There is no law of nature saying that for any system you wish to study, there is a simpler, easier to understand system you can study instead which should roughly replicate the results in your bigger messier system. Human economies are complex.
> There is no law of nature saying that for any system you wish to study, there is a simpler, easier to understand system you can study instead which should roughly replicate the results in your bigger messier system. Human economies are complex.
Perhaps true, but you don't have any evidence to support this assertion either. Physicists didn't launch ITER before doing a lot of experiments at a lower scale that they thought might scale up. Human economies do have models and rules--and often fairly simple ones model behavior quite well.
From my point of view, the first hurdle is making sure that UBI doesn't do active harm. A lot of "means-based" support DOES do active harm. The hard cutoffs have fairly severe perverse incentives that are now well-documented. Most of the UBI experiments seem to be indicating that they don't cause similar perverse incentives (that is the whole point of UBI but it's nice to have some evidence).
That's important because then the argument can be made that current "means-based" systems should be transitioned to either having a much larger limit or toward a UBI-like mechanism. Those have much more staying power than a UBI experiment.
I don't do this to "prove" that UBI works to the dog-whistlers--they will shout "welfare queens" until doomsday and simply can't be reached by logical arguments.
However, I would like to have some evidence that we are allocating the money that exists relatively effectively and that there isn't a better choice for doing so.
I think a lot of people who haven't been down and out, are vastly underestimating bad financial stress is - or how fast small paltry sums/debt can grow. As the saying goes, it's very expensive to be poor.
When there's no safety net to catch you, you'll have to make some hard choices. Is going to be the rent? or food? or medication? Pick one, and the rest will keep on compounding until the next round.
If UBI can work as a foundation to remove that stress, well, then I can absolutely understand how it improves the well-being of someone.
Do they? The findings suggest that a monthly stipend with an established expiration date doesn't provide a disincentive for people to work.
But the policy that this experiment is supposed to bolster--a real UBI--is a guaranteed monthly payment for life. I'm not convinced that these temporary experiments--in which the participants would be fools to 'retire', since the payments are temporary--are any indication of how people would behave when given a a real UBI.