There are a number of problems with UBI, and important and dangerous problems.
One of the basic concepts of Ubi is that you provide enough money for people to live without doing anything else. A lot of people will choose to live exactly like that. That seem so bad at first, except there's some pretty major consequences. You take away people's need to work to live, for a lot of people you've taken away the little shred of meaning they had in their lives. We know what communities look like when you do that. Around the world there are plenty of communities where people get just enough to live, and not a whole lot else. You get high crime, you get people destroying their own neighborhoods just for something to do, you get high levels of suicide.
Then there's the distinct problem that you create a class system: there will be the people who continue to work, and the people who do not work. This could play out in a number of different ways, in some cases we would expect the large underclass to be slowly strangled because they don't contribute anything anyway. You're going to live without working, the people who do work get priority. In other cases, we could see the opposite: the people who aren't working look at the extra that the people who do work get, and go "that's mine too", so eventually the only way to keep people working is under some sort of threat since their carrot has been taken away, all that's left is stick.
Then there's the evergreen problem of people who want to come in and take everything that's already been built: nothing new will be built. With masses of people unemployed by choice, and the economy not really giving incentives to people to go out and produce anything, there will just be less stuff for everyone. You can't print goods and services into existence.
Overall, it's an idea that is well meaning but would cause hell for a substantial proportion of the people trapped in such a system. It's like a perpetual motion machine: everyone claims they've built one but the laws of physics aren't that polite to let you.
One of the basic concepts of Ubi is that you provide enough money for people to live without doing anything else. A lot of people will choose to live exactly like that. That seem so bad at first, except there's some pretty major consequences. You take away people's need to work to live, for a lot of people you've taken away the little shred of meaning they had in their lives. We know what communities look like when you do that. Around the world there are plenty of communities where people get just enough to live, and not a whole lot else. You get high crime, you get people destroying their own neighborhoods just for something to do, you get high levels of suicide.
Then there's the distinct problem that you create a class system: there will be the people who continue to work, and the people who do not work. This could play out in a number of different ways, in some cases we would expect the large underclass to be slowly strangled because they don't contribute anything anyway. You're going to live without working, the people who do work get priority. In other cases, we could see the opposite: the people who aren't working look at the extra that the people who do work get, and go "that's mine too", so eventually the only way to keep people working is under some sort of threat since their carrot has been taken away, all that's left is stick.
Then there's the evergreen problem of people who want to come in and take everything that's already been built: nothing new will be built. With masses of people unemployed by choice, and the economy not really giving incentives to people to go out and produce anything, there will just be less stuff for everyone. You can't print goods and services into existence.
Overall, it's an idea that is well meaning but would cause hell for a substantial proportion of the people trapped in such a system. It's like a perpetual motion machine: everyone claims they've built one but the laws of physics aren't that polite to let you.
This isn't an extraordinary claim at all. It's well established through many different methods.
Cities with high levels of welfare such as Chicago and Detroit, as well as native reserves in Canada that are government funded communes are exactly what I had in mind -- there's poverty in a modern sense, but in a historical context some of the richest people in the history of the world and still richer than most of the world on a dollar for dollar basis. There are also examples of trust fund kids with nothing else to do committing suicide through lifestyle because they don't have anything else to strive for -- so rich neighborhoods can have similar issues to poor ones when you take away people's reason to live.
Many dogs misbehave when they have everything taken care of and they don't have anything to do with their energy. They might dig up your yard, tear up your furniture, freak out when the mailman comes by, and the advice from experts is to play with the dog more and to on more walks to "give it a job". Many millennials or zoomers are stuck in their parents house and they get all the essentials and sometimes more taken care of, and it's made the most miserable generation out there, with the most mental problems of all time.
The famous Mouse Utopia experiment gave mice all the space and food they needed and no natural predators. The results were that the mice became more and more dysfunctional until the colony fully died out.
Human beings aren't like lawnmower engines. You can't just fill them with fuel and do basic maintenance and expect they'll run properly for a lifetime.
As Dostoyevsky said: “Shower on him every blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, give him economic prosperity such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of the species, and even then, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick.” because that's not how we're built. We've evolved in a world that will kill us if we're still for too long, so in the absence of a need for useful work, we'll pursue useless or destructive pursuits.
Cities with high levels of welfare such as Chicago and Detroit, as well as native reserves in Canada that are government funded communes are exactly what I had in mind -- there's poverty in a modern sense, but in a historical context some of the richest people in the history of the world and still richer than most of the world on a dollar for dollar basis. There are also examples of trust fund kids with nothing else to do committing suicide through lifestyle because they don't have anything else to strive for -- so rich neighborhoods can have similar issues to poor ones when you take away people's reason to live.
Many dogs misbehave when they have everything taken care of and they don't have anything to do with their energy. They might dig up your yard, tear up your furniture, freak out when the mailman comes by, and the advice from experts is to play with the dog more and to on more walks to "give it a job". Many millennials or zoomers are stuck in their parents house and they get all the essentials and sometimes more taken care of, and it's made the most miserable generation out there, with the most mental problems of all time.
The famous Mouse Utopia experiment gave mice all the space and food they needed and no natural predators. The results were that the mice became more and more dysfunctional until the colony fully died out.
Human beings aren't like lawnmower engines. You can't just fill them with fuel and do basic maintenance and expect they'll run properly for a lifetime.
As Dostoyevsky said: “Shower on him every blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, give him economic prosperity such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of the species, and even then, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick.” because that's not how we're built. We've evolved in a world that will kill us if we're still for too long, so in the absence of a need for useful work, we'll pursue useless or destructive pursuits.
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