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The Almighty Buck News

The First Basic Income Experiment in Germany Will Start in 2019 (basicincome.org) 232

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
Basic income is going to be tested in Germany next year. From a report: The setup of the experiment will be similar to the one now ending in Finland, which means there will be an unconditional cash transfer to 250 randomly selected people among those already receiving benefits (250 others will act as the control group), and evaluate the impact in terms of labor market behavior, health and social relations. Behind this initiative, to be initiated in May 2019, is the Sanktionsfrei organization, a non-profit managed by volunteer professionals from administration, IT-tech, communications and law. Sanktionsfrei (meaning "free from sanctions"), with headquarters in Berlin, specializes in helping sanctioned citizens by the Hartz IV social security system in Germany. It will conduct this experiment in Berlin, for a 3-year period, accepting volunteers who may apply for it through their website.
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The First Basic Income Experiment in Germany Will Start in 2019 More

The First Basic Income Experiment in Germany Will Start in 2019

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  • "unconditional cash transfer to 250 randomly selected people among those already receiving benefits (250 others will act as the control group),"

    Oh, the honor!
    Participating in the unconditional cash test and being in the control group who doesn't get a dime. That's love of science.

    • In places where this system was tested, it has been fairly well established, that unless it is universal it will lead to some people stop working and things like that.

      • This test, like those in the past, is not a good test.

        1. It uses people that apply, and are thus self selected. They will likely behave very differently than randomly chosen people.

        2. It ends in 3 years. People will behave differently if they know they will need a job again in 3 years.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Technically speaking, these are not experiments, these are trial runs to gauge impact and outcomes in order to establish the best method by which to handle automation. Clearly labour concentration camps which you are no allowed to leave unless you have a job to do for the 1% will, well, no matter how hard they try and how many they imprison and how many they kill, will not work, they will fail, they seem to have finally accepted this. Though they still demand to live in opulent, extraordinarily wasteful and

  • The program is similar to the one now ending in Finland, which means it will fail on purpose and there will not be a permanent UBI program in Germany and by extension the EU.

    The people who run the world have announced their intention to starve us to death when our jobs are automated. If you live somewhere it's legal, buy guns.

    • Re:Broken by design. (Score:4, Funny)

      by Sponge Bath ( 413667 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @07:48PM (#57851206)

      The people who run the world have announced their intention to starve us to death..

      Nonsense. I'm sure every Tuesday will be soylent green day. Om nom nom!

    • It was a fine experiment, worth trying out. However if it didn't work then it doesn't work. If Germany is trying, what are they doing different than Finland.

      The problem has always been, there is a good portion of the population, will not choose to work if their basic needs are met. There are a lot of jobs that just simply suck, and there isn't too many people with such ambition to do such work. However the sting of capitalism is enough to get them to do whatever job they can do wither they like it or no

      • The idea of UBI is that if people had enough, they would would be more willing to take extra risks, to have their lives above basic income, but so far that doesn't seem the case. I think people value security vs wealth.

        Exactly this. All the current experiments are a failure because they only give extra short term security not long term security. None of the UBI experiments last long enough for someone to even go back to school and get a 4 year degree. If you want a good UBI experiment then model it after one of the many lotteries which give X dollars for life. If this sounds too expensive, then you can do this on the cheap by selling lottery tickets to fund this. This might skew the stats slightly but lottery ticket

        • But what would they study in their 4 year degree?
          The problem with Liberal Arts, isn't the Liberal Arts degree, it is the bulk of the students who get it. A lot of students go for the degree because it is light on classes that most people find Hard, Math, and Science, mostly because you cannot BS your way to a passing grade, either the answer is correct or it is not. So for students a Liberal Arts degree is the easiest route to a College Degree.
          However what has happened is these students who just BS their w

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by galabar ( 518411 )
      What would be your perfect program?
      • It needs to be unconditional, something you don't have with a pilot program where you need to pick people to participate. Part of the reason UBI is an important idea is that it doesn't come with the overhead of determining and verifying eligibility. It needs to be permanent. Five easy years isn't enough to fit college or a mortgage into.

  • Another flawed study (Score:4, Informative)

    by alzoron ( 210577 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @07:40PM (#57851172) Journal

    You can't tell how it actually works unless everyone gets it and the society is given enough time to adjust to it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's not supposed to be a complete, society level experiment. It's supposed to address the biggest worry most people have - that it will end up being worse than the current benefit system for those who are reliant on social security. That could be in terms of leaving them worse off, or in terms of discouraging them from working (which personally I think is nonsense, but let's test it).

  • Boot of Tyranny ion Your Face (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hackus ( 159037 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @08:03PM (#57851248) Homepage

    Oh how lovely.

    Give the masses just enough income so that they do not take notice of your ill gotten wealth and tyranny and rise up and hang you in your guilded enclave. We can not allow people to actually contribute to society, work and profit from their own endeavors and be independant could we?

    Oh heavens forbid no!

    Merry Xmas slaves and Happy New Year!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      You seem to be arguing that people have to suffer in order to rise up against wealthy criminals... I'm not sure that's a good basis for society. Or realistic, for that matter.

      In fact, let's compare democracy in Europe and the US. In Europe we all have very generous welfare systems compared to the US. By your logic Europe should be run by criminals, massively corrupt and full of rich people living in enclaves while the rest of us scrape by. But in reality there is less wealth inequality and in many places a

  • Universal income (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipakNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Sunday December 23, 2018 @08:07PM (#57851268) Homepage Journal

    Is a sensible, logical, rational, cheap way to run a society, and gives the electorate the power to hire or fire those controlling the supply.

    It doesn't make people lazy, all evidence says the opposite. Every scrap of evidence shows that crippling people's ability to work is what makes people lazy but that UI facilitates work.

    It also facilitates good work, employers can't risk unsafe or abusive conditions. Furthermore, healthy people with adequate resources can - and probably will - work harder as a result.

    Real work is about feeling fulfilled and productive, deep inate human needs, not about surviving to the weekend and dying young from work-related conditions.

    There are other philosophies. Other countries are welcome to them, so long as they keep them to themselves. Every country should be free to live as it pleases, not as some other country's pet.

    Will Germany's program meet the requirements? Doubt it. It's not a scale invariant concept, the numbers aren't statistically useful, the Germans are too rightwing to think collectively.

    • Re:Universal income (Score:5, Informative)

      by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @08:19PM (#57851316) Journal

      It doesn't make people lazy, all evidence says the opposite. Every scrap of evidence shows that crippling people's ability to work is what makes people lazy but that UI facilitates work.

      Would love to see that evidence; what UBI experiment succeeded? Or is this a case of "no True Scotsman" in terms of UBI never really being implemented correctly?

      • In Ancient Athens they had silver mines. The income from the silver mines was IIRC mined by slaves and distributed to the citizens of Athens. All the citizens had to do was attend the Agora, i.e. the citizen's assembly, and they would be paid for each day they went there. Judges were also paid per each court case they judged and it wasn't a profession back then. This did eventually lead to a lot of frivolous litigation cases though.

        IIRC the income from attending the citizen's assembly was enough to eat.

    • Not right wing? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by thesupraman ( 179040 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @08:43PM (#57851386)

      What continuously astounds me is people who dont understand that true UBI is actually a right wing/liberal concept.

      Most people forget that UBI involves the REMOVAL of almost all other state payouts.
      No pension, no unemployment, no housing, no sickness/disability benefit, no parental benefit, etc, etc.
      State medical care is a gray area..

      That is the reason UBI can function, because it removes a huge amount of corruption, bureaucracy, fraud, and inefficiency from the system and replaces it with something almost trivial to administer and deliver.
      It removes the punishments for trying to succeed.

      Politically, Socialists generally HATE UBI (at least those who understand it) as they believe the state is the best at decising how everything is distributed, and UBI is exactly the opposite of that.

      Unfortunately it ALSO removes the states ability to reward and punish based on cash payouts to voters.
      That is why it is never actually tried, and probably never will be, at least by a state - since it lowers their control.

      • Most people forget that UBI involves the REMOVAL of almost all other state payouts.

        That is the reason UBI can function, because it removes a huge amount of corruption, bureaucracy, fraud, and inefficiency from the system and replaces it with something almost trivial to administer and deliver.

        That's why I tend to like the approach. If you're on food stamps, they don't do you much good if your car breaks down and you can't get to work, if you'll even try to get a job because doing so might threaten your ability to get government aid.

        There are a lot of people who also like to complain that this would be some kind of massive handout, but if you look at taking all of the federal spending that would otherwise go into a UBI, you end up with enough to give everyone in the U.S. around $7,000 per year

        • I think the people that don't need the monthly dole should be able to get a yearly check. But that means the removal of every other dole program. Unemployment shouldn't be removed because that money is taken from the wages of the person claiming it while they were working. But it should not have indefinite extensions like we find now. But I don't see any of this changing here in the US anytime soon. Also should be added Term limits on everything.

    • {Citation needed} on all your claims.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by schwit1 ( 797399 )

      What a load of crap. Everything spouted here is based upon wishful thinking, ideal conditions and the HOPE that the people in power won't abuse it. Recent Soviet and Venezuelan history shows where it leads.

  • Strange definition of "unconditional" (Score:3)

    by SlaveToTheGrind ( 546262 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @08:10PM (#57851278)

    FTFA -- it's not the best translation but doesn't feel like a translation issue:

    Participants will receive unconditionally the amount from whatever sanctions they will be subject to by job centers (e.g.: by not responding to certain job offers or refusing to get suggested training actions); Sanktionsfrei will always try to recover the sanction money through legal action, and if it does, the participant will transfer the contested amount back to Sanktionsfrei. Otherwise, each participant gets, for the whole time period of the experiment, the full amount of their social security benefits, no questions asked.

  • It would be really interesting if two people who disagree on the likelihood of success could agree on how to measure the success of this experiment.

    Anyone have any suggestions on how to measure success of this experiment in a year or two or three, such that those who think it's a good idea AND those who think it won't work can both agree it's a reasonable way to measure success?

    Posts above mine claim that all UBI studies have failed, and that UBI proponents always say "the study had to fail because not everyone in the country got it". If that's not true, is there any UBI proponent here who can imagine any way this study could support their position? What outcome of this study would you consider "success"?

    Personally, based on history I think UBI is a really bad idea, but I'm open minded enough to look at the results of a study. What positive results should I be looking for? If you make a reasonable suggestion, I might agree that the result you suggest would in fact indicate a degree of success.

    • Anyone have any suggestions on how to measure success of this experiment in a year or two or three, such that those who think it's a good idea

      I don't think it's possible to measure the success or failure of something like UBI at year 2 or year 3 because I think it takes longer than 3 years to see actual changes in people's behavior. I think the bare minimum needs to be 5 years so that it at least gives someone enough time to go back to college. If we want to see actual results then look at the many smaller lottery winners with 20 year payouts. Does getting an extra 1k or 2k a month cause long term changes in behavior?

      • > If we want to see actual results then look at the many smaller lottery winners with 20 year payouts. Does getting an extra 1k or 2k a month cause long term changes in behavior?

        That's an interesting idea. That might be worth looking at. I haven't looked at it. I wonder what sample size we could find - winners of $1,000-$2,000 month for which we have long term information from a credible, unbiased source. It's time for me to get my daughter ready for bed, so I can't go hunting for that right now, but t

        • Without having seen any studies on people who won long term lottery payouts of $1,000-$2,000 / month, I'll willing to predict / guess that in most cases it didn't profoundly affect their lives. Anyone care to predict that it did?

          You will find that almost no one takes the annuity for the largest lottery prizes. There is extremely little data of the sort needed because short term greed wins so frequently. Most lottery winners are right back where they started within 5 years, because they take the lump sum payout (which is a fraction of the nominal prize amount) and shysters are capable of absorbing literally infinite amounts of money selling fools brand names. Just look at so-called "audiophiles".

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      Humanity has tried nationwide UBI - USSR, Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, various native American reservations, Alaska - you CAN get guaranteed basic income until the money runs out. In case of Cuba it was using USSR money and Saudi Arabia and Alaska is using oil reserves to fund its population, native American reservations kind-of-work (although being blamed for alcoholism and other issues) until the casino goes bust.

      In every case, everything works until you run out of - literally - someone else's money.

      • Actually, Alaska has what is known as a "permanent fund". Oil money goes into the PF, and payouts are from the dividends of the fund, and are averaged over several years of income. The payments are currently around 1/3 to 1/6th what even I think a UBI should pay out for the states.

        It is structured such that the money should never run out.

        From what I understand of the studies done on the Alaska PFD, it has been moderately successful at limiting poverty, limited by how much it is and that it is only paid ou

        • what even I think a UBI should pay out

          Right here is the fatal flaw of all UBI, "think" and "should".

          The Alaska fund is the only system that actually makes any kind of sense. It takes a specific source of money and divides it among a specific group of recipients. It may not completely eliminate all possible forms of corruption, but if you can have a reasonably unambiguous definition of what constitutes the source and what determines who is "eligible" then it's just a matter of arithmetic which is objective and doesn't lead to giving away money y

    • It would be really interesting if two people who disagree on the likelihood of success could agree on how to measure the success of this experiment.

      They could start by agreeing on the goal of the experiment. For starters don't call it an experiment of UBI if what they are testing isn't Universal, isn't Basic, and isn't Income.

  • "accepting volunteers who may apply for it" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @08:13PM (#57851292)
    Doesn't self-selection - or even preliminary self-selection - ruin such trials? Your sample doesn't then reflect the average population and you can't extrapolate from it accurately.
  • I would love to see this happen in the states as a program of the Federal Government but it will not happen any time soon because of the prevalent Libertarian ideology of no safety net whatsoever. Short of a major economic catastrophe, things will continue to lumber along in the new year much in the same way they have done this year.
    • I'm sure the party that got ~3% of the vote in the last election are the ones holding this back. Also, Libertarians are more likely to favor a UBI over other forms of government assistance because it can be done with less government and is more compatible with their market principles. A federal UBI also does nothing to preclude states from having their own programs alongside or on top of a national UBI.

  • They import 2 plus million people, very few of which can work or will work.

    This will simply reduce the value of money. So if you don't get a fairly immediate pay increase when this goes into effect, you're suddenly losing money.

    This is kind of like qiantitive easing. Not good for the middle class at all.

    Very basic economics and logic really. Very basic.

  • Predicting the Future (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Livius ( 318358 ) on Sunday December 23, 2018 @09:44PM (#57851598)

    I believe something needs to be done to keep society functioning if, as many expect, automation will lead to a fall in the demand for labour.

    But I am skeptical of universal basic income, and there are aspects that for some strange reason never seem to be discussed:

    1. Whose definition of basic? Is it subsistence, or some minimum of material comfort?
    2. There are people with light mental illness who will still need social workers intervening in their management of adult responsibilities.
    3. What happens if there's a change in technology or other societal change (could be global warming, or something else) that leads to a massive labour shortage?
    4. Will there be inflation? Will changes in housing costs force people to relocate against their will?
    5. Will people really be able to lead meaningful lives without employment? (Maybe you will, but will everyone?)

    • I'm a libertarian who supports an UBI program:

      My general plan:
      Around $6k/year, paid in monthly installments of approximately $500 per person. This happens to be the federal poverty line for a household of 4. I'll also listen to proposals for $8k per adult, $4k per child(perhaps sliding by age?).
      Eliminate all other non-medical welfare payments.
      Restructure the tax system. It was neater before Trump changed things up, but basically eliminate the first two tax brackets and bump up the 3rd by 1-2% to pay for

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Re 1. Whose definition of basic? The governments to give, reduce, stop.

      2. There are people with light mental illness who will still need social workers intervening in their management of adult responsibilities.

      The basic income would remove all other city, state and federal support. That person better be "adult" in terms of a bank account, rent, food, health care.
      3. Massive labour shortage? Look to history. Riots, wars.
      4. Will there be inflation? In a funny way. The gov has to tax everyone sti
  • Looks good on paper, at least to marketing and sales types, but in reality it really doesn't work all that well and is far from being efficient. Only really works properly if you believe in magic. So it goes with so-called 'Universal Basic Income'; simple math shows that it would quickly bankrupt any country that tried to implement it on a scale encompassing the majority of their population. I'm just surprised that a country like Germany is willing to entertain this nonsense, I assumed they were smarter tha
  • I'm sure all of these people illegally migrating will be horrified at the prospect of being given money for nothing. They will all stop coming tomorrow.

  • Professional unemployed class (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pablo_max ( 626328 ) on Monday December 24, 2018 @01:38AM (#57852116)

    Germany already has a professional unemployed class who collect "hartz 4".
    These people already know all the tricks to keep getting their benefits and to rarely pay rent and not get kicked out.
    If you are a property owner in Germany, the first rule is NEVER rent to a person on H4. While they are on H4, you are paid by the unemployment center. If the people get a low paying job or a part time job, then they have to pay you and not the H4 office. Which means you will likely never see a cent.
    Then, since they are on H4, it is almost impossible to get them out of your building.
    Even if they are literally destroying your building, you still need to start a long and costly legal battle which can take months to finally get them removed.
    Then, the parasites move to the next victim.
    Are there people who need a helping hand? Of course. Should we, as a society help them? Of course.
    But we also need a common sense way of doing it. Why are people allowed to just keep popping out more and more babies so they never have to work?
    I know many people who took a chance on H4 people and nearly every single one of them got totally screwed over for trying to help them out.

    The only thing more money in their pockets will do is let them buy more stuff. Which I guess is great for the local liquor markets.

  • And then I'd use the next few payments to afford to take two weeks off and go on an additional vacation!

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