Basic income (Unconditional cash) to poor people showed big results
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Remain Calm Join Date: 2002-11-02 Member: 5216Forum Moderators, Constellation
Remain Calm Join Date: 2002-11-02 Member: 5216Forum Moderators, Constellation
This is years old, but just recently saw it in a local paper.
http://www.bignam.org/BIG_pilot.html
Basically, in a town of about 1000 people, they unconditionally handed out ~$15 to everyone, and things improved dramatically.
Also, it failed to result in laziness and mass alcoholism as opponents had expected.
You guys think it would work for everyone?
http://www.bignam.org/BIG_pilot.html
Basically, in a town of about 1000 people, they unconditionally handed out ~$15 to everyone, and things improved dramatically.
Also, it failed to result in laziness and mass alcoholism as opponents had expected.
You guys think it would work for everyone?
Comments
Direct cash grants have regularly proven the best anti-poverty method, but are typically not done because some money will inevitably go to those considered 'undeserving'.
Who decides what 'undeserving' is? Also, what proportion of 'some' is significant enough to deny the majority?
Namibia Cost of Living
Also, why, given these results, with this sample, can you (or the large chunk of people who feel that aiding the poor will lead to negative results [not saying that's you]) come up with the generalized statement that there will be more freeloading if you were to offer people this sort of help?
Or why a large body of people assume that the majority people who use programs such as welfare (I know the BIG is different, but you used the same terminology [freeloading] as the folks in my example) are lazy, good for nothing, moochers who have never worked for anything, ever, and if offered financial help assume it will be squandered somehow.
I'm doubly perplexed because most of the people who feel this way in my locale (Colorado), that I have talked to about this (fairly small sample, I know), don't personally know any such people, yet are perfectly comfortable making blanket statements like about them.
I agree, but the problem is that with increases to minimum wage cause a direct increase to prices you see at the store.
Or, the corporate bourgeois can take a cut in their profits, they'll survive. And still live like royalty.
Also, we joined the same day.
From the Presidential candidate of a major US political party:
I agree its stupid, but its the reason why guaranteed minimum income programs usually don't get implemented on a large scale. The fear that someone, somewhere might be getting a benefit they don't "deserve" paralyzes these type of collective action policies.
You can't rail against making blanket statements and then make one yourself. Sticking it to the bourgeois is a vaporware goal. I won't deny such people exist, but this statement is dismissive and makes two critical assumptions that I don't think you've fully explored:
1) Do they make enough that they can supply the necessary funds for those who really need it?
2) Are any of your measures going to actually work on so callous and efficiently selfish a person?
There are two people primarily hurt by minimum wage, small business owner-operators and low wage earning workers. This is because you have artificially mandated a higher cost of labor, and small business owners already operate at the margin. They cannot raise prices high enough to cover the cost if the market won't allow it. The only options are to close or reduce labor costs in other ways by working the laws any way they can. Ultimately, that results in people not being able to find work.
A much better way to legislate basic income is negative income tax (wikipedia). Normally, when you work, taxes are taken from your wage automatically each pay check. Under negative income tax, you are instead paid extra for the difference between your working wage and whatever has been legislated as "minimum livable wage." This money comes from local, state, and federal governments instead of the business. This has the important consequence that the business can now buy labor at the price the labor is actually worth, instead of what they are mandated to. You can work a $0.50/hour job cracking walnuts for the bourgeois who use you as a footstool while smoking a cigars and still bring home $40,000 a year. To make the people worried about freeloading happy, you have to work doing something, anything, before you get the aid.
My thoughts:
Will this work everywhere? No.
Did it help as much as the organization Bignam wants you to think? No.
Do they exagerate the effects? Yes.
Was it a good thing none-the-less, and did it help? Yes.
Will it work in somollia? No.
Did it work in nambia? yes.
But, what does it result in?
Going off what I've seen, it's mostly spent on:
1) Oil/Heating bill
2) A new electronic device (Iphone/TV)
3) Alcohol
4) More alcohol
In Germany every party has proponents of an unconditional income (although the discussion is kinda on hold for now due to the €-crisis). One major proponent is the owner of a chain of drugstores that are quite successful, so they can't dismiss this easily as a thing only lazy people would speak for.
I had some good fun by simply asking people: "Would you still go to work if you got €800 just for being a citizen?". Everybody's answer was "yes, of course. You need to do SOMETHING!". When asked if an unconditional income could function people would answer "no" because they seem to assume everybody else is lazy.
Then there was this one guy who said no...
Would it work? "Of course! People are dying to work. They need a boss. They don't want to decide for themselves. They become depressed if they have too much time to think about life"
I tend to agree with him. So obviously people are working with numerous assumptions about "others" that are, to say the least, unproven.
I think it basically avoids the old conflict between "labour" and "capital". You want to accumulate as much money as you can? Go ahead! You are free to do so, but you will have to provide a good job. And the more displeasing a job is, the more you will have to spend to convince somebody to work for you. That's a good thing if you ask me!
It certainly is a concern, no matter how little the increase. See this video:
Minimum wage forces business to pass any cost over the actual market cost of the labor to the consumer. That directly increases the cost of the good or service you are buying.
Also, that YouTube channel looks mostly like a collection of conservative economic tropes. I think this one quite nicely sums up the 'quality' of the channel:
have they done a double blind study on this?
On minimum wage I think this sums up the issue nicely:
It's not a conservative trope channel, it's a collection of videos explaining classical liberalism (wiki). The video only explored one aspect of the minimum wage argument. Your link only explores another. If you raised the minimum wage and it had no effect on the employability of workers, you expect employment to increase, not stay the same.
Classical liberalism attempts to solve social problems from the bottom up while others would rather start with the all the data and try to work back toward some guiding truths. The problem we have with this method is that the world is complex. The best thinkers alive can only hold a handful of axioms in their head at any given time to use in problem solving. Think of these as black boxes. This is how we successively build a logical argument, by examining known black boxes and their interactions, convincing ourselves we haven't missed any outliers (those are called bugs in software :P), and then declaring the total interaction a new black box with well defined inputs and outputs. This black box can be placed into the next most complicated problem.
We work from the theory that the correctness of decisions at the complex end is directly proportional to the soundness of assumptions made at the simple end. Which is why we spend so much time arguing over simple toy problems like how much a burger costs.
In that light, back to your link. Models of employment make many assumptions, like every other model has to. One is how to deal with labor supply. That is, the number of people that are willing to work. The assumption is that the higher the cost of labor, the more people are willing to do that labor. There's more to it than that, but the assumption is sound enough to use in the thought process. It relies on virtually no previous infrastructure to be true. If that is the case, when you raise minimum wage, you are increasing (artificially) the cost of a unit of labor. Under our assumption, more people will want to work now, unless you're already at 100% employment or 0% of the jobs were paying less than the new cost of labor before the increase was made. If that's the case, what has caused virtually no change in employment? Well, we need more information for that. What were the metrics used for employment in that study? Nearly anything could have happened. Employers might have hired two part time workers instead of keeping just one worker and paying overtime, since that small change was magnified by time and a half. The cost of a unit of product could have increased exactly the amount of the wage increase (very much most likely). The point is, force a wage increase does not change the real value of production, nor the market value of the final product. The total value of the transaction is determined only by those two factors. So when you raise the wage, something on either end is forced to give. Negative income tax completely avoids this problem, which is why I offer it as an alternative. Please understand that I'm not attacking the idea of charity or moral correctness. Too many times a discussion of the logical merits and outcomes of an issue get clouded by moral grand standing.
There are other models of human motivation, but they are not direct replacements for monetary gain anymore than monetary gain is a replacement for them. One in the service industry is the motivation to simply solve problems. Personal fulfillment only works if you have an established base of living. Farmers can do it. People in a service industry can do it. Service industries rely on production industries; they rely on the very mechanisms of capitalism that refine raw goods into products of greater value.
That also ignores the fact that a majority of people don't and will never find absolute personal fulfillment in the job that gives them the resources they need to stay alive. They might find pride in that job, but they use hobbies for what really makes them happy.
Personally, I find models a good way of figuring out causation once you've found a correlation. The problem I have is many neo-classical liberal concepts fail at even establishing a correlation.
Even the conclusions of the link you posted were better predicted by free market ideas: as I said if raising the minimum wage worked, you would expect more employment, not equal or less.
And it all starts with the philosophical belief in three natural human rights: life, liberty, property.
People who own multinational corporations don't like to share their money.
Look at WalMart.
A good example of what you're talking about however, is a business like CostCo.
The average Wage of workers there is $18/hr, and the CEO/Owner of the company still rakes in the money.
Most everyone has their own idea of what constitutes undeserving, traditionally it's been alongwell established trends like blacks or gays or poors or jews or... I can't think of any other short words ending in ess...
But even if the big trends are breaking down slowly, if steadily, most everyone still has their own idea of a person or group of people who doesn't deserve help, and thus if any generalised help may benefit them, it can't possibly be considered because a lot of folks take real objection to charity, apparently.
It's odd but the idea of giving someone something just because you can, and not just because they deserve it, just... really seems to alienate people. I have that myself to a degree but it's an odd idea if you think about it. I wonder where it comes from.
A popular group to apply this to nowadays, what with traditional reasons like 'you were born wrong' becoming dangerously politically incorrect, is criminals. How many people do you know whose idea of justice is to execute or imprison everyone for more or less everything, especially things they personally find annoying, without examining why and [i]certainly[/i] not bothering with any of that silly 'rehabilitation' nonesense, and then in the next breath complain about how they shouldn't have to pay to support prisoners.
People are strange, they can be both remarkably considerate and remarkably horrible, for remarkably difficult to comprehend reasons.