I think I’d rather first have free education, healthcare, public transit, and a half dozen other things paid for / subsidized by the government before UBI is implemented.
Especially as the world gets more complicated: giving people money without any sort of structure or guidance is a recipe for malaise and lack of purpose.
The key point is that people feel better because they have more financial security…which is better achieved by providing the resources I mentioned.
It has nothing to do with laziness, as the (unnecessarily hostile article argues) but is simply because the world is getting more complex, and an inflationary-prone method like UBI is inferior to actually investing in societal institutions.
Many UBI proponents never seem to ever discuss public goods, but think that the ideal solution is to just make everything rest on the individual. I don’t think that will work, and to me it obviously didn’t work during COVID, which was a real world application of UBI.
UBI proponents, in the US at least, usually don’t discuss investing in the public good because both political parties and most of their respective wealthy donors are actively hostile to the public good. The current administration just decimated weather forecasting earlier this year, after all.
UBI sneaks around the problem by giving the rich the same exact benefit as the poor.
Yes, and this is why I’m a bit skeptical of the idea of UBI in general, as I can already tell it will be used to politically justify cutting public services in the name of efficiency.
I don’t think a society with poor public services and UBI is a desirable one. It sounds pretty dystopian to me, frankly, especially if people become dependent on the payments.
A society with poor public services and UBI is better than a society with poor public services and no UBI; I suppose that’s my position. They didn’t need UBI to exist before they started cutting everything.
Most everyone is already dependent on the federal govt anyway. Barely a fraction of the country could survive a year without some kind of federal aid or social services.
Good chunk of the world already has all of those, so it looks like talking about UBI is right on track there. I suppose countries like USA would need to figure out the basics first though, I agree any basic income seems redundant if one trip to ER wipes out several months worth of UBI anyway
> giving people money without any sort of structure or guidance is a recipe for malaise and lack of purpose.
The whole article talks about this aspect. What was your take on the points the article raised with respect to this?