What basic income will most likely do is send vast swaths of average people to entertainment and drugs. It's already happening, as social nets get bigger and wider.
This is a huge concern. I have known several people who, when they lose their seasonal jobs, coast on unemployment insurance until the very last minute, sometimes even going as far as welfare and couch surfing before a new job finds them (they won't go looking for it themselves).
All they want is beer, weed, porn, and video games. They don't seem to want relationships, work, friendships beyond smoking buddies... it's saddening, honestly.
I worry that UBI will enable large swathes of these people, permanently stunted in their personal growth, incapable of acting as real adults. Meanwhile, UBI itself may not be a sustainable system; if it results in taxation that cannot be borne by those who keep working, the result will be that it will eventually be cancelled. What happens to all those who subsist on UBI if that happens? Nothing is guaranteed...
Like you say, these stunted people already exist. They already do everything in their power to minimize their work time, including trying for disability or welfare. UBI won't create more of them, and it won't end the ones we have, but it may add stability to the working poor.
How do you know that UBI won't create more of them? It's a common refrain, like with legalization ("anyone who wants to smoke weed is already doing it"), and I know several people who didn't smoke before it became legal, and are now smoking regularly. It seems reasonable to think that UBI would enable some class of people who would otherwise exert themselves, to no longer bother.
Because there's already social safety nets those people can use. And yes, absolutely, there are probably going to be groups of people who are barely working now that will stop, but given there's already means to not work, I can't see this being a huge group, and really, this is an optimist / pessimist face-off, which is sad, because that's how we probably see the possible outcomes too. The only way we can know if it'll work or not is for someone to try it - which, thankfully, YC is.
Not sure if you've ever used those social safety nets, but they are not easy to qualify for and/or sign up for, so only the stubborn and/or desperate actually take advantage of them. There are also disincentives, like misinformation, run-arounds, and social shaming. From what I've heard, these reasons are exactly why UBI is a better strategy than those social safety nets--and why we can expect more people to take advantage of them.
The modern welfare state (post-1930) did create a huge number of these stunted people. UBI will create many more, and it'll be a generational compounding effect, as the stunting increases through generations and we develop familities where no ancestor has worked for 3+ generations.
Just reflect for a moment on how many of such stunted people existed in 1925, compared to today. Now apply that difference again a few more times, to a segment of the population with above-average fertility, and guess how many generations such a system can last.
If there were no stunted people, why did the welfare state get created? And do you have any evidence of this increase, or did it just codify the problem that already existed?
>>All they want is beer, weed, porn, and video games. They don't seem to want relationships, work, friendships beyond smoking buddies... it's saddening, honestly.
Honestly, this says more about your need to judge those people, than those people themselves.
What is wrong with wanting nothing other than beer, weed, and video games? Seems like a nice, simple life. If it makes them happy, why does it make you sad?
Is it because your happiness is shackled by some utopian (or rather, dystopian) dream where everyone "realizes their full potential" or some such nonsense?
He just feels it's not his responsibility to enable it, and that the government forcing him to is violating his freedom of choice.
At least, that's one of the things that bothers me about it.
Civilized society is all about trading individual freedom for group stability, and perhaps UBI is on balance a good idea.
I'm not sure myself, but I tend to be skeptical of claims that "X will solve society's woes."
Giving people wealth doesn't change them, and it has really fouled up some places - look at what happened to Haiti after the earthquake when all the aid poured in. Local farms largely died out because they couldn't compete with free food, and as a result the country became less self-sustaining and wealthy.
So, yeah, I guess I have similar concerns for UBI.
My uncle is a perpetual slacker and alcoholic. Last winter he got frost bite on his feet so bad that they ended up amputating both of them. He couldn't be bothered to get up and stoke the fire.
It's all of our little brothers. It's an entire generation of lost souls spending their lives on World of Warcraft and Fortnite, feeling like they are accomplishing something by earning another loot crate. When fantasy becomes more compelling and stimulating than real life, it's no wonder.
In the past those people would have loitered around shops (remember when that was a thing), spent afternoons in fishing holes, or just gotten drunk all day, or spent all time reading low-brow fiction.
Escapism is a fact or life and there's not much evidence that people are doing it a substantially higher rate than before. Or, that escapism is actually any worse than being forced to work miserable jobs until you rot away.
Where are you living that social nets are getting bigger and wider? It seems to me that the modern idea, since the 1980s, has been to constantly cut them back.
There will be people that go to entertainment and drugs as well as people that take that money to add to society. The question is what the net effect is.
Basic income solves the problem of how to get spending money to consumers. This is an important problem. If consumers don't have spending money, then the economy won't function properly.
It is true that, in today's economy, we try to get spending money to consumers in other ways. Are these alternatives somehow more effective than basic income?
For example, should we be making up unnecessary work for people to do as an excuse to give them spending money? Should we be distorting the labor market by "creating jobs" or artificially boosting wages?
A big part of what a properly calibrated basic income does is that it allows the labor market to be efficient.
You're certainly right that we don't want people to become miserable blobs. That's not a happy life. But what's the best way to prevent this? Is it to withhold money from them and force them to work at unnecessary jobs? Or can we do better?
I also have a hard time buying that. Wouldn’t that mean that high tax countries with more welfare would be more probable to have big drug problems? E.g. Sweden does not have a bigger problem with drugs then the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_prevale... (and of course you are not saying that social welfare is the only parameter)
I think it can be balanced by the amount of UBI. UBI should just be enough to make sure no one goes hungry or has to sleep out in the cold. That, in addition to public health care and education and access to libraries and opportunities for self-growth. Anything more can and will be misused. Anything less makes it too risky for people to experiment and fail. At least that's the theory I have in my head. How exactly to determine this amount fairly? I don't know.
Even assuming you had any facts to base your assumption, why is that a bad thing? There is nothing holy about work, especially work for the enrichment of others.
I, an i suspect many people here, get paid handsomely to move bytes from one place to another and this funds either our ambitions or tastes. I think it's hard to argue that your general well paid tech employee is contributing to society moving bytes around appreciably more than a stoner chilling out on the couch.
It will probably do both. "There are people who will take risks that they otherwise wouldn't be able to with a basic income" and "there are people who will do nothing of value to anyone besides themselves if they have a choice in the matter" are not mutually exclusive.
