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this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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"People with a reasonable income aren't poor."
Yes, and no.
You can be a millionaire and end up broke.
Some people are "poor" because they have no idea how to manage their money and live well beyond their means.
But having a livable income still matters, obviously.
Let's not conflate income and wealth. With a living wage you may not be able to accumulate wealth, but at least you will have your daily essentials covered.
My concern with a universal income is that it discourages healthy people from working and thus contributing to our collective wellbeing. So while in principle it helps some people who currently fall through the cracks of our welfare system, it also reduces the pool of people contributing to it through their taxes. Is it a net win? I don't know.
Every study I've heard of shows that is not what happens except in very narrow situations. For example, the study run in Dauphin, MB found that teenagers were less likely to work or to work less, but that was because they were choosing to focus on their schooling and, in some cases, actually stay in school. IIRC, there were also people who chose to stay at home with young children or care for infirm relatives rather than find other care options so they could go to low wage, "low skill" jobs. Those outcomes seem positive given the results of other studies regarding education and family care.
There is a general problem in mass psychology where people sitting around a table or in their armchairs try to imagine the impact of a policy without conducting a study or looking at historical results.
Let me present some more historical results: retirees. Do pensioners contribute more or less to society than before they retired? Are they a net contributor or a net drag? A UBI turns everybody into a pensioner.
The two situations are not identical, but they give me pause.
This may not apply everywhere, but around here (Saskatchewan), retirees are the lifeblood of service and community organizations. From the quilting club that generates revenue for brain injury research and food banks to the senior centre that helps people age in place, retirees are a critical component of the glue that holds us together.
Even if you have a fairly narrow economic view of what it means to contribute to society, there is no question that retirees are making those contributions. While actual money is required for most things, nothing happens without people putting in time and retirees have plenty of time and aren't shy about using it.
This is something I became aware of as my older relatives retired. Now that I'm retired myself, I'm more active than ever in the community, despite having also retired from the volunteer fire and rescue service.
How does their volunteering compare to the forty hour weeks they used to work, on average? How specialized is the work they do compared to what they used do do, on average?
When we remove the incentive for people to do something, they do it less.
Okay, so I do less computer programming for money, but it's still a hobby and I contribute to a few open source projects.
But here are a few things that wouldn't get done if I were still employed:
That's approximately where my list ends, but fellow retirees are helping less abled people stay in their homes and communities, showing up at social justice rallies, and a myriad of other things that are important both societally and economically. If it's judged to be less important than employment, it's also important to note that much of it wouldn't be societally affordable without our free labour, yet has profound impacts on quality of life.
And I disagree that removing incentives leads to less being done. External incentives, like paycheques, are probably the least effective incentives there are. Most people are motivated by passion, desire, contribution, and satisfying results.
How many times have you seen people hop to a higher paying job? And how many switched to a lower paying job?
And yet most people quit working as soon as they have the financial means to do so. How many of them spend 40hrs/week volunteering afterwards? People pursuing some hobbies part time is not going to sustain the financial necessities of a developed nation.
Wait what? This is not even close to true.
A pensioner receives a stable income for life even when they are not working.
A UBI recipient receives a stable income for life even when they are not working.
It seems to me like a pretty similar situation. And what do most people do when they are eligible to receive a pension? They stop working. They may do a little volunteering on the side, but it's not typically on the ballpark of what they did before.
I'd like to hear your counterpoint.
They are not 67 years old for one.
Come on, this is not a serious argument and you know it.
Do early retirees act any differently? My kid's teacher retired at 55 and she wasn't talking of all the work she was planning to do afterwards. I know a couple other healthy early retirees and they don't do anything productive either.
The funny thing is people in this thread are complaining that rich people contribute nothing to society, but they avoid saying that the reason rich people don't work is because they don't have to. We all know that if we didn't have to work we would not do a fraction of what we do today.
If we reduce the number of people who actually work and contribute to our tax base, there will be not enough budget to fund UBI, healthcare, or anything else.
Note that you're using the term "retiree" in this example, but were talking about pensioners previously.
A lot of pensioners do keep working. Many because they enjoy working. Many because they need the money. The government specifically publishes information on the rules: https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/retirement-planning/working-collecting-pension.html
You are right, I've been sloppy.
Do you have any data on what percentage of them do, particularly full time? Based on the people I know, they spend most of their time with hobbies, chores and socializing. Not that there is anything wong with that, but as a larger percentage of our population becomes unproductive it will become harder to fund social services such as healthcare or the UBI.
I spent a bit of time digging about and couldn't readily find information specifically about pensioners, but it was an interesting bit of digging to do, so thanks for the opportunity! I couldn't find specific data for the number of Canadian pensioners who have jobs. There is plenty about people aged 65 and up that I believe supports my assertion.
A nice high level quick find was [this 2017 Canada Census analysis from statscan( https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/as-sa/98-200-x/2016027/98-200-x2016027-eng.cfm). There's a small section that includes some information that seniors with private income (savings or pensions) work less frequently than those with none but there's not really hard data there and it wasn't obvious to me which sources they were drawing from. A couple of the most relevant bits from the Highlights section are:
One of the data sets published in 2023 is "Employment income statistics by industry sectors, Indigenous identity, highest level of education, work activity during the reference year, age and gender: Canada, provinces and territories, census metropolitan areas and census agglomerations with parts"
The link has the data filtered to those 65+, and the top row in the table shows that the total number of income recipients is 1,079,410. Per this 2022 report there are around 7 million Canadians who are 65+, which is somewhere around 14%.
Tell us more anecdotes from the early 80s boomer.
She retired last year, making her Gen X. I am younger than her.
Not that any of that makes any difference: people stop working as soon as they have the means to do so.
Since you have resorted to personal insults it is safe to assume that you have ran out of actual arguments. Thank you for the conversation.
You are asking me to disregard heaps of peer reviewed research because you ran into a lazy retiree once.
But I’m the one running out of actual arguments?
So a retiree that doesn't work is now lazy? Does that mean by extension that a UBI recipient that doesn't work is also lazy?
Re. the pilot studies, I don't believe that the behavior elicited by a short term study automatically extends to a lifetime UBI.
As a counterexample I have suggested looking at pensioners, particularly healthy early retirees. If our working-age population experienced a fraction of the productivity loss that we see in healthy early retirees, we would not be able to fund our current expenses, such as healthcare, let alone a UBI on top of that.
So a person who has contributed heavily to society should have no expectation to reduce their contribution, except perhaps some of the wisdom they accrued over the years? Work til we die, or we hold no value? I question your worldview. For what other reason have we progressed technologically except to make life easier? The only other realistic options are to increase the rate of progress or to reward some few people excessively while the rest of us work ourselves to death. Perhaps it's time to consider the middle ground.