I Think People Should be Paid not to Work, if That's What They Want: Switzerland to vote

[Iskaral Pust]

Well, it happened in Finland.

Finland Plans to Give Every Citizen, Rich or Poor, $870 a Month

http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/12/06/finland-basic-income?cmpid=tp-ptnr-huffpost&utm_source=huffpost&utm_medium=partner&utm_campaign=tp-traffic

That's pretty much exactly what I described upthread: (1) it applies to everyone to remove negative incentives/free-riding/exploitation and (2) it's small enough to be affordable and not remove an incentive to work in undesirable jobs.

The report does not say how many public employee administrators and bureaucrats will be laid off as benefit administration has been simplified and overhead reduced to help fund the program.

[Solmyr]

I wouldn't rejoice yet - Finland has merely initiated the process of reviewing this option. Chances are they may not end up implementing it. I still remember when Switzerland last tried and then abandoned the project.

And yes, €800 a month is perhaps at the poverty line in Finland. Depending on accommodation it might even be below, unless one lives with roommates and such. Not a life most people would choose, so the argument that it disincentivices working is invalid.

[Larry of the Lawn]

I think some kind of basic income is going to become a necessity at some point if we don't adopt either some kind of population control, have a massive and successful luddite rebellion, or decide we are okay with big chunks of the population starving.  

I think most of the hard work arguments made in the thread have been spurious.  I liked Isk's take on it, most people who work think they work hard.  They want to think that.  It's not it's own reward.  I think I work pretty hard, and I don't really get paid that much for it.  I have a kind of niche job where I'll always have work, but it's also kind of obsolete: most of what I do is luxury shit people don't need.

Which is tough to wrap my head around, because on one level I love the progress of energy-efficient housing, and the idea of 3D-printed houses as a cheap and efficient way for someone to build a home makes me kind of giddy, but it's also directly shitting all over my romantic attachment to my trade.  Which I still think predates prostitution.  

 I can work 70 hour weeks for 8 months of the year and then sit on my ass all winter because I don't have any work.  I'd say that out of anyone I've ever hired or seen hired in my line of work, maybe 2-5% are actually capable of working and stay on for more than a month.  It's not easy; I don't find it particularly difficult, it's just not something that people are that suited to.  But it really doesn't pay much.  A good year and I net $20k after expenses.  

I really don't see much of a connection between 'hard work' and income, but then I'd never expect to.  Not to say that anyone making a lot of money doesn't work hard, I just don't think there's much correlation there.  

I would happily give up the hard work and take the money.  I really only do the hard shit because about once or twice a year I actually get paid to do a cool, rewarding job and build a giant fucking functional stone fireplace or a 8 ft high dry-stacked stone wall.  The rest of the shit just pays the bills and funds my stone habit.  

So personally, I love the idea of basic.  Especially if it's thing where housing, food, transportation are on a card and then you can still get a job and earn money if you need to.  I'd imagine that just consolidating social services would save shit-loads; but I guess the details would really dictate whether or not a basic income program would succeed or not.  Anticipating more automation in every industry, along with population growth, it just seems like it's going to happen in one form or another eventually. 

[The Anti-Targ]

Well well, looks like Switzerland is about to vote on pretty much this. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/switzerland-will-be-the-first-country-in-the-world-to-vote-on-having-a-national-wage-of-1700-a-month-a6843666.html

"Switzerland is set to vote on a proposal that wants to pay everyone 2,500 Swiss francs (£1,700) a month regardless of whether people are working or not.

"If the plans go through, it will become the first country in the world to provide a basic unconditional monthly income, and they are already the first country to vote on the matter."

I suspect it won't go through, but it's interesting none-the-less that it's actually got to the point of the people voting on it.

[The guy from the Vale]

I can guarantee you this has absolutely no chance of passing, sadly.

You have to realize the bar for what people can vote on in Switzerland is far lower than in most other places. I see that as a good thing, mostly. My main concern is that there's a strain in Swiss politics that openly disdains international agreements and human rights, and those too often win incredibly close votes. But that's not really an issue for this referendum (which, again, has a snowball's chance in hell of passing)

[Commodore]

 

[Altherion]

Indeed, there was no way this would ever go anywhere in modern Switzerland. It currently has an unemployment rate of 3.8% (the highest in the past 20 years was 5.4%) and a median monthly salary of around 6000 CHF (currently, the CHF and USD are at parity). That is, if you are a Swiss citizen and you are willing to work, you will almost certainly find a job and you will almost certainly be paid more than the basic income proposal. It's a very prosperous and relatively egalitarian country -- a universal basic income makes no sense there.

[Iskaral Pust]

It would be interesting to try a policy of providing a targeted social welfare payment to young women from low income backgrounds for as long as they remain childless, along with free birth control.  It would have some unfortunate associations with eugenics but it would flip the current unintended incentives in govt benefits and produce a huge societal benefit, as well as benefiting the women themselves. 

[Shryke]

3 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

It would be interesting to try a policy of providing a targeted social welfare payment to young women from low income backgrounds for as long as they remain childless, along with free birth control.  It would have some unfortunate associations with eugenics but it would flip the current unintended incentives in govt benefits and produce a huge societal benefit, as well as benefiting the women themselves. 

 

And be holy shit problamatic as fuck. Hey your birth control failed, fuck you and eat shit we're taking your benefits away.

[Dr. Pepper]

Yeah, this is up there in the pile of completely stomach churning proposals.  It's so disgusting that I figured it had to just be a joke in extremely poor taste.  It would penalize any poor woman who wanted to have children, penalize rape victims who became pregnant, penalize incest victims who became pregnant, penalize religious families who do not want to use birth control, and lots of other really shitty things.  It penalizes poor children for simply existing.  I mean, I wouldn't put it past some GOP politicians to propse something like this, but literally this is something that would be supported by the scum of the worst scum.  

 

[baxus]

7 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

It would be interesting to try a policy of providing a targeted social welfare payment to young women from low income backgrounds for as long as they remain childless, along with free birth control.  It would have some unfortunate associations with eugenics but it would flip the current unintended incentives in govt benefits and produce a huge societal benefit, as well as benefiting the women themselves. 

I'd rather see a program that would provide incentive and opportunity for people (regardless of gender) from low income backgrounds to get educated. For example, every student gets a monthly payment as long as they stay 

This proposal would result more in "let's get birthrate in minority comunities down" and is bad.

4 hours ago, Dr. Pepper said:

Yeah, this is up there in the pile of completely stomach churning proposals.  It's so disgusting that I figured it had to just be a joke in extremely poor taste.  It would penalize any poor woman who wanted to have children, penalize rape victims who became pregnant, penalize incest victims who became pregnant, penalize religious families who do not want to use birth control, and lots of other really shitty things.  It penalizes poor children for simply existing.  I mean, I wouldn't put it past some GOP politicians to propse something like this, but literally this is something that would be supported by the scum of the worst scum.  

To be honest, I don't care one bit about penalizing people who don't use birth control for religious reasons. They need to get educated on that matter regardless of the program Isk mentioned.

Other than that, you do make valid points.

[Altherion]

9 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

It would be interesting to try a policy of providing a targeted social welfare payment to young women from low income backgrounds for as long as they remain childless, along with free birth control.  It would have some unfortunate associations with eugenics but it would flip the current unintended incentives in govt benefits and produce a huge societal benefit, as well as benefiting the women themselves. 

This is politically unfeasible for several reasons, but even if you could somehow get it passed, I'm not sure how it would work: what happens when they stop being childless? If you switch them over to the existing program, then they'll just take your money for a few years under the proposed program, then have children and keep taking your money under the existing program. It would eliminate the incentive to have the first child, but at the cost of paying the childless and I'm not sure that enough people deliberately decide to have their first child to qualify for welfare in order to make this worthwhile. If you stop paying them altogether, then the proposal is even more politically impossible. Besides, in that case it would be better never to pay them at all (except perhaps for providing the free birth control).

Also, I see your point about societal benefits, but there are also drawbacks. Most Western countries are already below the population replacement rate and reducing the birth rate even further exacerbates the inverted age pyramid issues.

1 hour ago, baxusz said:

I'd rather see a program that would provide incentive and opportunity for people (regardless of gender) from low income backgrounds to get educated.

We already have those in practically all Western countries and also several Asian ones (e.g. Japan) -- hence the low birth rates.

[DireWolfSpirit]

Under 4% unemployment and a median salary above $70K, it was no surprize to see this referendum fail. Why rock a boat that is sailing so well, it made zero sense imo.

[Commodore]

just start a GoFundMe that distributes contributions indiscriminately

no need for coercion if it's a good idea

[Iskaral Pust]

I didn't mean the suggestion to be inflammatory, and I completely recognize the massive obstacles to any practical implementation.  It wasn't a serious policy suggestion but I do think it would be "interesting to try" in some format if there is a natural experiment taking place somewhere in the world, e.g. a high financial incentive to stay in school (much higher than the benefits paid to an unemployed single mother not in school), which is a good indirect way of achieving the same thing.  I thought I read an article once about a program in Africa where an NGO was paying young women to attend school.

One of the largest societal problems we have is kids born to unready, unprepared, unable, unfit (think of drug addiction), and/or disengaged parents in disadvantaged communities.  We increasingly see that society can or will provide only minimal benefits to ensure (hopefully) that they are fed, housed, schooled, etc., but unable to meaningfully close the huge gap in life opportunity for these kids.  It may be impossible, infeasible or just too expensive for external support mechanisms to overcome their gap.

Another experiment would be to separate the nurture elements.  Kids are nurtured by their immediate family and by the community around them.  If communities reach a critical mass of dysfunction, they don't seem to recover well.  So a possible policy is to take very low income communities, whether urban minorities or rural spots dominated by meth and Walmart, and provide housing vouchers so that each family ends up in a middle to upper middle class neighborhood with high expectations around educational attainment and a dim view of gun violence.  But the low income people would be in single family homes and very widely spread.  The point would be to reverse the critical mass problem.  The obvious downside of this is that it smacks of cultural eugenics and forced assimilation, and could create severe problems for the first generation attempting to fit in and possible resentment from their host communities.

Our current tacit policy of warehousing poor people in silo communities and relying on gang violence and substance abuse to limit their numbers is not particularly humane or effective.  The call for more/better jobs is a bit of a red herring because the days of under- or uneducated people earning solid middle class incomes at low skill labor are gone (a lot of public sector employment is already a jobs program for minorities with low education, and look at how the TSA is doing), and that's even before criminal convictions reduce access to jobs or a need for childcare eats up the whole paycheck.  We have to help prepare the disadvantaged to fully participate in society and the economy, with opportunities for independence and self-fulfillment.

[Swordfish]

Quote

So a possible policy is to take very low income communities, whether urban minorities or rural spots dominated by meth and Walmart, and provide housing vouchers so that each family ends up in a middle to upper middle class neighborhood with high expectations around educational attainment and a dim view of gun violence.  But the low income people would be in single family homes and very widely spread.  The point would be to reverse the critical mass problem.  The obvious downside of this is that it smacks of cultural eugenics and forced assimilation, and could create severe problems for the first generation attempting to fit in and possible resentment from their host communities.

 

We've been trying this to at least some extent since the sixties.  Granted, these experiments haven't taken into account the 'widel;y spread' portion of your plan, but the benefits in general have been pretty limited, where they exist at all.

 

Quote

Compared with the hypothesized benefits, the actual benefits from living in mixed-income developments
or income-diverse areas have been limited for low-income households. In particular,
investments have brought about environmental improvements to housing and neighborhoods,
but benefits tied to economic desegregation and poverty alleviation have not been realized.

 

Quote

Studies from outside the United States have produced similar findings. Blockland and van Eijk
(2010) found in the Netherlands that residents they identified as “diversity seekers,” people who
moved to income-diverse areas because of the income diversity, had social networks that were no
more diverse that those of other residents. Diversity seekers also were no more likely to become
involved in neighborhood organizations or to attend local social activities than other people. In
the United Kingdom, Bretherton and Pleace (2011) found that residents who owned a home in
a mixed-income area tended to perceive residents of social housing units as bad neighbors and
purposely kept interactions to a minimum. Arthurson (2010) found three factors that served to
depress interactions across income lines in income-diverse neighborhoods in Australia. Lifestyle
factors included decisions among subsidized residents to maintain stronger ties to their previous
communities and differences in lifestyles and work schedules that left little time for developing
new relationships. Design factors included spatial segregation of residents by income within a
mixed-income area that reduced opportunities for informal interactions. Finally, stigma attached
to residents of social housing units worked against interactions across income and tenure.

 

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