You asked about multiple jobholders and hours worked. These are tracked by BLS. You can often find nice plots from the St. Louis Federal Reserve by punching
Search terms fred
into Google.
E.g.:
Other useful links:
Census and BLS on hours worked:
https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat19.htm
BLS on hours worked and income:
https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/1999/Spring/art02.pdf
Thank you.
I do always wonder how accurate those numbers are. These are based on surveys to businesses and households, not on some giant database that compiles everyone’s payroll information.
There are 60,000 surveys sent out to households. I don’t know that I’ve ever gotten one, but I do know that I’ve never filled one out.
I have to wonder if there is some bias in those numbers, as someone with multiple jobs is less likely to have the time or energy to fill it out.
As an employer, I think I’ve gotten the survey twice (That’s sent to 144,000 businesses). I’ve replied to it twice, but I may have missed it if I’ve had more. Once again, I have to wonder if there is bias there, as smaller employers may not have time to reply.
As well we all should.
I will nitpick that these data are from the Current Population Survey, based on months-long series of interviews with a household, not on one-off questionnaires. That said, no survey, even one so massive, is immune from sampling or nonsampling error (both discussed and researched extensively at BLS and elsewhere), so it’s more useful for trends and comparisons than for any individual measurements.
Error or no, I still advise posters to familiarize themselves with what data we do have. It would save a lot of misconceptions. And the data are fun. Because we’re nasty like that.
An issue today is whether CPS is capturing gig work accurately.
This X 100.
One good thing about UBI is that it’s universal. People who grumble about what “those” people are doing with their tax dollars are also affected. UBI will or won’t go to them as well.
For this reason, I’m not a fan of negative income tax. UBI has the same effect on the economy, but it’s not targeted to a certain group of people. [Greg Mankiw, economist on how a means tested transfer has the same effect on the economy as UBI.]
Also, before the time stamp is Mankiw’s skepticism about Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax.
Whenever there’s a ‘what’s cool when you’re rich and trashy when you’re poor’ threads on Reddit, tax credits is always on there. Getting a tax credit when you’re poor is seen as taking other people’s tax money while taking advantage of a tax loophole when you’re rich is seen as being clever and powerful. I’d like to see the stigma on this reversed, but since that’s not likely to happen, UBI would get around that problem.
I’m fine with some form of economic levelling. I don’t know if it’s “UBI” or some other mechanism would be more effective. But regardless, I’ve come to the conclusion that a person’s “cost” from a resource standpoint is not always going to equal their ability to contribute to society. Which is not to say that everyone should receive equal compensation. Far from it. But I do believe that just because someone can create a lot of “wealth”, that doesn’t mean they are creating value for society. Often that wealth is highly concentrated and compartmentalized in a specific industry or population segment. There are significant barriers to entry (i.e. expensive degrees) to higher paying careers and often those careers are of dubious society value.
I mean you can’t tell me the investment bankers and corporate lawyers and bitcoin miners create a greater benefit to society than schoolteachers and firemen, regardless of how much they get paid.
IOW, I don’t buy into the Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged bullshit where every dollar one earns is the result of their hard labor and ingenuity. Even in that book, most of the wealthy “producers” inherited their wealth anyway and seemed to have no qualms about ignoring their fiduciary duties to their shareholders as it suited their whim. I see little difference, morally speaking, in mismanaging a company through incompetence, fraud, or some ideological imperative to “stop the engine of the world” because you don’t like the tax/regulatory structure. In real life, corporations are not some stand-alone entity that exists solely because of the will of its founder.
I’m not an economist though. So one question I do have is would UBI create inflation that effectively eliminates any benefit from UBI in terms of real purchasing power?
I’m not an economist either, but I think UBI needs to be a redistribution of existing money, taking it from social welfare and other Govt programs that would no longer need funding (the result of the net benefits UBI put into the local economy and community, lower crime rates, better health, etc), rather than creating it out of nothing, and thus would be resistant to inflation.
I haven’t read the book or know what her theory is, but I don’t see how that could be correct. When AI takes over, it won’t be able to replace teachers or firefighters but will be able to replace research corporate lawyers, diagnostic doctors, some corporate accountants. So the highly paid people of today that will be replaced by AI will somehow become less hardworking and ingenious instantly at that time? Doesn’t make sense to me.
Depending on how it’s funded, there are a lot of studies to say that it won’t cause runaway inflation. But one thing to consider might be how the covid stimulus didn’t cause inflation.
In most cases UBI will need to be tied to inflation inorder to deal with the “natural” inflation in the economy. The trick is how to do it so it doesn’t create weird feedback loops.
To minimize the effects of UBI inflation most of it will have to be pulled back out of the economy through taxes so if say your household income is $131k and you received $31,200 in UBI your taxes should go up $62,400. Though the exact balancing point will depend on the system implemented the idea is that enough will be pulled out of corporations and the top income earners so that UBI ends up being neutral and redistributive.
Ayn Rand espouses laissez faire free market capitalism, meritocracy, minimal taxation or regulation, currency tied to a gold or some other standard, minimal barriers to entry/exit, and generally an economy based on mutually agreed transactions. The concept being that every person has the right to the fruits of their labor and may trade it as they see fit. If AI (or a metal super-alloy and perpetual motion engine in the book) disrupts existing industries, then so be it. Those lawyers, doctors, and accountants will either need to adapt or find new ways to add value to society. But ultimately society is more productive and better off with those advancements.
Her philosophies can be appealing because they oppose the creation of complex self sustaining bureaucracies and courrupt regulatory structures that do nothing but perpetuate themselves. “Looting” as it were from those who actually create stuff. Think of a world full of Elon Musks and Steve Jobs without government interference.
I sometimes hear about her adherents. But I’ve never heard of any of them advocating for closing all the corporate tax loopholes or lobbying against bailing out of corporations. If her hypothetical is to work, then stacking the deck with government regulations in favor of corporations wouldn’t create the wonderland she’s espousing.
Basically, B ark personnel. The Golgafrinchan solution is looking more attractive – just be careful about the telephones.
Which is odd because that is literally the entire plot of Atlas Shrugged.
I meant failure in the sense of positively affecting the ‘poor’ as a group in an area/people group/society.
Of course many things might improve the quality of life of a single person while being a net negative to others. Law & policy changes must be measured on how they impact the majority of the people group they are trying to help rather than an individual.
I would guess you mostly hear about the characterizations here on the board. It took me two seconds to find an article on the libertarian party website complaining about farm subsidies. Most of the libertarians I know are very against corporate subsidies as well as the 2008 bailouts. Tax loop holes tends to be more hit or miss because most of them don’t like taxes so not paying taxes is a good thing even if it is a corporation not paying.
I just want to point out that any real degree of money-derived happiness is NOT a basic need, at least not in the sense of something the government (and by extension those of us who work) should be paying for.
Not exactly UBI (universal basic income) related, but it does give some evidence for the idea that financial stability can be increased by giving more cash to citizens, which leads to benefits in mental health and food insecurity.