Researchers from a U.S. think-tank have released a report detailing how a universal basic income could impact the overall economy. Based on their research, a UBI of $1,000 per citizen per month could help the economy grow by the trillions in just eight years.
In the sense that most people would blow any money they get which would stimulate the economy several times over, I suspect the methodology is reasonably rigorous. The moral hazard, of course, is the possibility it creates unintended side effects, such as economic stimulus usually has top-down benefits and you might have runaway inflation.
Researchers from a U.S. think-tank have released a report detailing how a universal basic income could impact the overall economy. Based on their research, a UBI of $1,000 per citizen per month could help the economy grow by the trillions in just eight years.
Execution of this UBI (its actual implementation) would be key.
When you give people money in exchange for nothing, many will choose to sit down and do nothing.
With a "you get $1000 per month just because you exist" system in place, the actual incentive to find a $1600 per month job (assuming 20 working days and 8 hours per day) would be a net increase of less than $4 per hour, not even counting transportation and other ancillary costs.
I'm 100% with Warren Buffett on this: pay people market rates, and then help them with negative taxation. But you have to work to qualify.
Virtually every Chinese millionaire or billionaire is self-made because capitalist reforms to the centrally planned communist economy only began in the early 1980s and did not really take off until the 1990s. But the modern super-wealthy often turn out to be descended from an earlier capitalist class. Richard [Liu] is no exception. Before the 1949 revolution his family were wealthy shipowners who transported goods along the Yangtze river and the ancient imperial canal from Beijing in the north to Hangzhou in the south. They lost everything when the communists took over and were forcibly resettled at least twice. One academic survey found more than 80 per cent of Chinese “elites” (those with income at least 12 times higher than the average in their area) are descended from the pre-1949 elite. Richard puts this down to “family culture”.
“My parents and grandparents taught us a lot — not Chinese or maths but a sense of values, of how you should be and how you should treat others,” he says. They also drilled into him the knowledge they had once been very rich but everything had been taken away — a lesson all too relevant even now.