A Genealogy of the Idea of Universal Basic Income

If targeted programs can be poorly designed or mismanaged inconsistently, then so could UBI. The whole idea is to thoughtfully design a program. If that is possible, there's no reason we can't thoughtfully design targeted programs, and UBI would still be there in a lesser capacity precisely for those people that would fall through the cracks of those targeted programs.

UBI just feels like a kind of sledgehammer, when a dozen scalpels might perform better. I'll grant that UBI would be superior to the very loose "safety net" of social programs in the US though.

Even with a "strong" UBI program, I still think we'd need other programs as well-- UBI will be far too low for people that suddenly lose a job that pays 5x UBI and need to get by until they find new comparable employment, as an example.

> Therea plenty of evidence that this isn't really all that true

"All that true" doesn't mean anything and is ostensibly misleading, ie false. There are segments of the population (pareto) that try to excel, but they generally do not do it sustainably (burnout). Common terminology...scams, shortcuts, work smarter not harder, are all colloquialisms centered around basic human behavior. Even working in ANY industry, people do everything in their power to either accrue wealth simply and/or make their work easier, without taking on additional work and asking for more compensation for doing more with their time.

That being said, the one lingering question I have comes down to a variant of inflation. I think most people think of inflation as something that only happens as a result of monetary policy, but that's not entirely true. Let's say that UBI could be entirely funded through taxation, no new money is introduced into the system. There is still a form of inflation on certain goods. For example, let's take an extreme example of redistribution: we take all of the money from a billionaire and redistribute it. One billionaire doesn't buy 100,000,000 TVs for their house, but 1,000,000 people with $1,000 might each buy a TV. 1,000,000 people with an extra $1,000 has a much larger impact on demand for typical consumer goods than having that wealth be more concentrated. Of course stricter taxation of the uber-wealthy would have impacts lessening demand for large investments, so it's not a blanket inflation in the same way that just printing money would be, but it still has all of the same characteristics of inflation within certain consumer markets.

It's all very complicated, and I would like to see it modeled. If I'm a landlord, and I know that my tenants now have an extra $12,000 a year, do I raise rents? I think the natural argument is that because the scarcity or value of my real estate didn't actually change, I open myself to being undercut by competition if I try to arbitrarily raise the value of my property to reflect increased demand. But the problem is that it might not be entirely true that the value of my real estate didn't change. When I have to call a plumber, or gardener, or construction worker for a remodel, are their rates going to be the same? Are rates going to go up or down? It's very hard for me to know for sure.

It reminds me a bit of debt. Debt shouldn't necessarily produce inflation, but it definitely does. Do you think houses would cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars if the average person didn't have access to debt? Would it cost 50k+ in order to attend college? No. Access to debt dramatically increases the prices on the things purchased by the available debt, regardless of whether or not this theoretically is meant to produce inflation. My concern is that, as with access to debt, the increase in wealth will be met with an increase in cost across the board, and not due to exploitation, but because the effects are that most consumer products and services actually just end up costing as a natural reflection of increased demand.

To make it worse, there is often an income point where the payment goes to zero (ex. if you make more than $800, you are no longer eligible, leaving a $200 gap). Or there are certain benefits that are lost (child credits, transit credits).

With UBI, you get $1000, but then every hour worked puts more money in your pocket.