India floats the idea of a universal basic income

Forcibly redistributing income from low resource generators to high resource generators creates an incentive for people with fewer resources to have more children than they are capable of supporting. This dynamic will in the long run lead to more people that produce fewer resources.

Currently government is redistributing income upward by economic prohibitions (regulatory barriers):

http://cepr.net/publications/reports/working-paper-the-upwar...

and it is redistributing downward with social welfare spending, with the US massively increasing social welfare spending since 1972:

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/what-is-...

Annual spending growth on various components of social welfare spending (1972 - 2011):

>Pensions and retirement: 4.4%

>Healthcare: 5.7%

>Welfare: 4.1%

Annual economic growth over the time frame:

>2.7%

The only thing it has to show for giving people more "free money" to spend is a higher trade deficit, stagnant wage growth, and, I would argue, an explosion in the amount of single parenthood:

http://pinetreewatchdog.org/500-rise-in-single-parenthood-fu...

But hey, since 40 years of social democracy has failed, let's keep doubling down and giving people more "free" money.

The end result of this bidirectional forcible redistribution is the productive middle class being destroyed, and two classes becoming increasingly significant: a small upper class controlling a growing share of national output, and a large unproductive underclass that is dependent on the taxes that upper class pays, constituting an increasingly large portion of the population.

This would be devastating for the Indian economy in the long run.

I also think having a ceiling on how much money you can have go hand in hand with UBI. Imagine Bill Gates can have only 3 million dollars of money in his total assets. It will be intetesting to model such a civilization and see the effects.

>Basic income offers an escape valve to the corrosive effects of inequality. It distributes more fairly the fruits of globalisation and automation. It gives every citizen a share in the national prosperity. It gives us all a reason to cheer for the greater good, and not just our own advancement.

I think this hits the nail on it's head; opponents of basic income (usually rich or might-become-rich people in my experience) do not see this clearly. We would be able to cheer for greater good as we do not have to struggle for money anymore in our own tiny world of our household.

I think that UBI would be a good plan with or without robots taking over. But robots forces us into it as people will simply die; sure there might be some other jobs (although I think this revolution is so different than past ones that it will not happen like that, but we can only see as everyone of their generation says this) but for many people these jobs will come too late or are not achievable.

In the factories we work with, most people were replaced by robots, there are only a few people in the very big buildings. Some of the assembly line people I did speak to because I was curious, but really, they have no up potential: they cannot do anything else but actual robot work. I would be highly surprised (and so would the owner of the factories who tried this) if anyone could retrain them for a non robot like task. These people will not die (I am told) in China as thr gov find something for them, like standing on a street corner to watch the traffic or sitting in front of a building to see who goes in and out (but nothing else: not like a porter), but in many other countries it means you cannot buy food or pay rent. And that is it without UBI.

I am in no way for a distribution of wealth equally; we know that will not work as countries tried, but we are now at a complete opposite and that does not work for many either. When there are less (well paid) jobs it will not work for most suddenly.

This seems like a poorly thought out comment: the point of UBI is that everyone is signed up for it. Everyone gets it and that simplicity makes it far easier to audit. AFAIK, having only ever read about India online, everyone has a biometric-backed ID already, making it easier to link payments to individuals.

Another anticipated benefit of UBI is that once people are out of desperate poverty there is less incentive to cheat.

(We have seen that paying police officers a living wage is one way of reducing police asking for bribes: I imagine that a similar dynamic would be at play with UBI)