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Steve Bosserman

Why we should all have a basic income | World Economic Forum - 0 views

www.weforum.org/...should-all-have-a-basic-income

universal basic income

shared by Steve Bosserman on 11 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Possibly of more importance, what don’t you do
  • What’s incredibly expensive is not having basic income, and what really motivates people to work is, on one hand, not taking money away from them for working, and on the other hand, not actually about money at all.
  • The truth is that the costs of people having insufficient incomes are many and collectively massive. It burdens the healthcare system. It burdens the criminal justice system. It burdens the education system. It burdens would-be entrepreneurs, it burdens both productivity and consumer buying power and therefore entire economies. The total cost of all of these burdens well exceeds $1 trillion annually, and so the few hundred billion net additional cost of UBI pays for itself many times over. That’s the big-picture maths.
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  • Thus basic income does not introduce a disincentive to work. It removes the existing disincentive to work that conditional welfare creates.
  • UBI has the potential to better match workers to jobs, dramatically increase engagement, and even transform jobs themselves through the power UBI provides to refuse them
  • In the US, 70% of workers are not engaged or actively disengaged, the cost of which is a productivity loss of around $500 billion per year. Poor engagement is even associated with a disinclination to donate money, volunteer or help others. It measurably erodes social cohesion.
  • Perhaps best of all, the automation of low-demand jobs becomes further incentivized through the rising of wages. The work that people refuse to do for less than a machine would cost to do it becomes a job for machines. And thanks to those replaced workers having a basic income, they aren’t just left standing in the cold in the job market’s ongoing game of musical chairs. They are instead better enabled to find new work, paid or unpaid, full-time or part-time, that works best for them.
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