Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "UBI Failed and Everyone Is Pretending It Didn't" video.

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.
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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.
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@Patrick-857 It's not inflationary. You hand everybody $1k in UBI and you tax it away from the people at the very top. The great thing about UBI is that it's a way of inserting money into the bottom from where it can circulate up to people that have more wealth. Whereas, tax breaks and money to the rich never trickle down to any meaningful extent.
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If economics were a science, which it most certainly is not, it would be helpful in terms of figuring out policy, for the same reason that knowing things about physics and engineering makes for better designs prior to construction. $1k a month is hardly anything, but the fact that the average work decreased by less than 2 hours a week says a lot about how much money you'd have to hand out before it would start impacting on labor participation in general.
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@aniksamiurrahman6365 The point of UBI is that people spend it in whatever way they think will be best, It shouldn't be so high that it prevents people from wanting to advance themselves, but you also have to realize that the study was only 3 years long and there's a lot of ways of developing yourself that aren't easily measured. Just cutting back to one job so you're not so burned out is self-development.
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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.
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So, how do you explain the incredibly small reduction in hours worked?
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@Patrick-857 That's not how that works. That mainly happens because the government chooses not to tax the excess away as they're more afraid of deflation than inflation. Truth is that short periods of both aren't a big deal, it's the longer periods where people start to expect one or the other that can cause problems.
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A reduction of less than 2 hours a week of work is consistent with the UBI needing to be super high in order to negatively impact workforce participation and probably was the result of people cutting back to just one full time job. The lack of any growth of wealth is to be expected. This was only a 3 year study and the sorts picked probably had a lot of delayed expenditures that don't show up on the balance sheet. These are things like getting their teeth fixed or auto repairs.
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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.
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@xiaoluwang7367 I suspect that what will likely happen is that at that point, we'll start paying people to engage in hobbies.
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That was a different era. There was still a massive amount of infrastructure that was needed and most people working were spending most of their work day actually working. These days, not so much. But, things like the Grand Coulee Dam have ad a massive impact on modern society. He could also have had people work part time for the money and that's the route he likely would take if he were President now.
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@eldrago19 In many cases research studies require a trip to the library or an expensive subscription.
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@EMan-cu5zo So? Just look at the work being done these days. So much of the work being done by people earning living wages is complete and utter nonsense. You've got studies repeatedly coming up with the fact that most officer workers only spend a few hours a week actually working, with the bulk being either screwing around by the water cooler or in meetings. The reason why labor participation is low has to do with the nonsense of insisting that people work 40 hour work weeks, permitting a bunch of companies to render jobs redundant via mergers and then just flat out letting the infrastructure to crumble so that billionaires can have more paper wealth.
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@ElectronFieldPulse We kind of already did that though with the pandemic relief. And the reports that had come out at the time indicated that on the whole, the money was used on sensible things rather than just wasted. There's also the more targeted programs like the ones that were specifically for helping parents take care of their children as well. This study mostly serves as propaganda to fight against UBI rather than being a particularly informative study. The ones done in the 3rd world are far more likely to be what would happen if we got UBI in the US.
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@AbsentMinded619 One of the few things this study shows us is that you don't need to. If this had been scaled up for an entire count or state, there would have been increased economic activity as more or less all the money handed out was spent on something with only a very small reduction in hours worked.
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I gave up listening about 4 minutes in and just skipped around. It's just really grating to hear all that talk about the argument being this, from somebody with that accent while completely missing the point. When the US did stimulus checks, that money was, on the whole, spent rather wisely by the people who were in bad financial situation. And it's hardly the poor people making stupid decisions, it's that there's an entire system set up to prevent them from making other decisions. There's a lack of affordable grocery stores in those neighborhoods, there are significant restrictions on having any savings to cover emergencies, the moment you go slightly over the income limit you get a cut to benefits that puts you in a financially worse position than you were in. The reason why it looked so promising in 3rd world countries is that the main drain for those poor people is corruption and that can potentially be dealt with. They don't have a formalized system set up to exploit the poor and have a permanent underclass the way that the US does. Additionally 1,000 people in the middle of an established economic system does not a valid study make. The kinds of changes that UBI is expected to bring require a much larger portion of the local population to benefit from. It's money coming in near the bottom and filtering its way to the top. The people at the bottom have the money to cover basic expenses without working, so there's more money available for spending in the local economy Which filters up to more economic growth over time. What's more, because it is such a small study, most of that money probably wound up in the hands of Amazon as that's often the most cost effective way of buying things these days, but it does nothing at all to improve the local economy and little to lift those people out of poverty. Additionally, this was only a 3 year program, it takes a good chunk of that time for an economic system to adjust when such a radical change is made. As far as the 1.3 to 1.4 hours less, that's nonsense. Most of the folks who would qualify for this sort of thing were working significantly more than 40 hours making ends meet and the drop in income is probably not significant when you consider the cost of traveling to another job and the related expenses of working. Which makes sense, they needed to work less overtime, so they did. The long term financial change not changing is to be expected, as I already stated, this was just 3 years long with the money mostly going out of the area. This whole video is just the sort of ignorance that has come to characterized the debate. Ignore the fact that the study is simply too small to have any sort of expectation of a meaningful outcome and then say that we studied it, it didn't work, so don't bother. Which is stupid. People were working too much, so they cut back a bit. There probably would eventually have been some improvements, but burnout takes a lot longer to overcome than some people seem to think
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@dyhidrogenmonoxide Does it? I could have predicted these results before the study was begun. Despite being paid enough to just not work, they only cut their hours by an average of less than 2 hours a week, but their wealth didn't appreciably increase. I'm not even sure how that wasn't just assumed to be the case. Rather than stop working the way a lot of the UBI critiques allege will happen, they kept working. And, the net wealth didn't increase because this is a massively short and underfunded study. This is 1,000 people getting a UBI for only 3 years. And there is an incredibly well-developed system in the US to take advantage of the poor. Things just cost a lot more and a lot of these people were already in a bad situation. 3 years may seem like a long time, but it really isn't and expecting that there would be some sort of meaningful change in such a short period of time was never realistic. Considering all the payday loans out there, a net change of zero over the time period studied is arguably success. Especially when you don't get the kind of knock on effect of local economic growth from such a small number of recipients.
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@stuarthall3874 The futurist failed to predict that Reagan would come into office, tax rates on the wealthy would crater and the wages would stagnate while more and more of the total tax burden would land on the poor. Had the same breakdown of the GDP been maintained, that likely would have worked out.
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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.
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