Resumo
- Yet findings published today from the largest randomized basic income experiment in the US to date, backed by Sam Altman and OpenAI, should get your notice. The study, held from November 2020 through October 2023, gave 1,000 recipients $1,000 per month, no strings attached.
- Spreading the fear of AI stealing all our jobs seems to garner much more enthusiasm for basic income than continually pointing at the evidence.
- The basic income movement might be better off severing ties with speculations about AI altogether. Then, the conversation could focus on what basic income can actually be: an effective anti-poverty tool that would neither stave off dystopia nor usher in a leisurely paradise, but instead, just a world with less poverty.
- Recipients spent an average of 125 per month, excluding the transfers.
- If there was any silver lining in the paper on health, it was that recipients went to hospitals, doctors, and dentists more often, and spent about $20 more per month on medical care as a result of the transfer, which the authors note could translate into indirect benefits in the long term
- One of the most controversial and politically charged parts of the basic income debate is how it would affect work. Among critical economists and policy wonks, the concern isn’t that we’ll need basic income because there won’t be any jobs left after AI, but that basic income could itself be the thing that wipes away our desire to work
- I’ve previously written about how, until recently, Americans across the political spectrum used to see the promise of capitalism as exactly that: delivering people the choice of cashing in economic progress for more leisure time. (…) Apparently, a generous basic income can at least help nudge that choice back into workers’ lives.
- Everyone seemed to mention how getting unconditional cash was literally changing their minds for the better.The mechanism doesn’t have to be all that mysterious. Everyone faces their own challenges, and people with low incomes especially so. But woven through all the differences is at least one shared consequence: stress.
- One person might wind up finding better work and taking on more hours thanks to the cash, while another might scale back their hours to spend more time with their kids. Both cases can be good outcomes to the individuals involved, but “as an average treatment effect, where one person worked a lot more, while another worked less, it all kind of averages out.” she said.
- if you’re talking about unconditionally giving people enough to live on indefinitely, you’re either imagining a society of monks, that everyone lives in rural West Virginia, or you aren’t actually talking about basic income at all, at least as it exists in any viable form.
Minha Opinião
Parece bastante complicado entender os impactos que uma Renda básica universal tem na sociedade devido às diferentes formas como as pessoas que recebem essa renda têm de gastar tais valores. No entanto, parece-me que dois pontos são fundamentais: o primeiro é entender que uma Renda básica universal não garantirá que as pessoas parem de trabalhar e, provavelmente, não reduzirá significativamente a desigualdade; o segundo ponto é que é necessário dissociar Renda básica universal das questões de automação e da expansão do uso de Inteligência artificial, uma vez que a necessidade desse tipo de renda está mais relacionada a questões sociais do que propriamente tecnológicas.