Comment by blindriver

> We already had the world’s largest ubi experiment during Covid and it was a complete failure.

COVID response neither featured a UBI, nor saw everyone stop working (and the people who did stop working largely stopped working because of a combination of formal restrictions and voluntary behavior changes due to a contagious illness either banning their mode of business or resulting in them not having customers, additional government support, which was not structured as a UBI, was given because of that and to cushion the impact of it.)

The height of unemployment in the US was 14.8% in April 2020. By the end of summer it was down to 7% and continued to fall.

https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...

15% unemployment is high, but it’s definitely not “everyone stopped working entirely.”

The CARES Act authorized a one-time payment of $1,200/$500 per adult/child in March 2020, an extension added $600/per in December.

The American Rescue Plan Act passed in February 2021 and added $1400/per.

This is the closest the US got to UBI-adjacent policies at the federal level.

It’s difficult to believe that the first payment caused a massive spike in unemployment, but the subsequent two did not.

> We already had the world’s largest ubi experiment during Covid and it was a complete failure.

I believe there might have been a slight confounding factor involved.

Could there have been any other reason for people not working in 2020?

This seems to invert the causal chain. People stopped working almost entirely first. That is why we got the benefits.

It has also been shown that people behave differently when they know the benefit will end.

Beyond these issues, for the COVID experiment there are far too many confounds to say anything conclusively about UBI from it.

I don't think the pandemic was a good measure of the impact UBI would have. People were being laid off before the payments started. There were certainly those who quit or decided not to work as a result. And there was a lot of inflation. But it is hard to draw any conclusions from the random panicked temporary approach vs a more well thought out implementation.

Wait, what? Do you mean the mass layoffs during Covid, or the resulting state subsidies paid out?

Here in Europe, people moved to remote work, but nobody "stopped working".

None of that was universal, and none of that counts remotely as "income".

People stopped working because of Covid, not because of the safety nets, you should remember that a lot of businesses closed down which usually means not being able to afford staff.

It's not clear at all from the pandemic what UBI would do, this is completely inverted...

> Everyone stopped working entirely.

Firstly, that's not at all true. Secondly, those who did stop working did so because they were unable to work, because their company could not operate without in-person contact (i.e., restaurants).

Also, the government benefits only came _after_ people had stopped working/companies shut down, not the other way around.

Everyone stopped working entirely? What? Perhaps because of Covid.

Not to mention inflation.