Germany begins 3-year universal-basic-income trial

These studies don't really prove anything.

Common arguments in favor of these studies -

"They prove people don't quit work on UBI!"

- No, they prove that people who are in a program that is very clearly temporary will not end their careers for a short pilot program. This means nothing.

"They prove people won't spend it on drugs, booze, and lotto tickets!"

- No. If you make $1k from a job and $1k from a pilot program each month, you spend the $1k from the pilot on legitimate bills and now you have $1k to spend however you like. The study can't trace that money. (This isn't to say everyone on UBI uses it for drugs, rather, it's to point out that you cannot deduce they don't just by tracing the way the transfer payments are spent)

"The studies prove people's life and happiness improved because of UBI!"

- No kidding. You gave someone several thousand dollars no strings attached in a situation where neither taxes nor inflation would rise as a result.

What UBI skeptical people want to know is where is the proof that we can afford to tax ourselves to pay ourselves, where is the proof that it won't hurt long term productivity, and where is the proof that it doesn't cause inflation. A 120 person 36 month trial program cannot answer any of these questions.

Based on how most jobs will get automated some form of an UBI will be required sooner or later.

Now the only question is: how to you phase in UBI while still rewarding extra productive people to keep creating/innovating?

Some will say "those people will innovate out of love". This is not always the case, many people are good at what they do and create many awesome things but given the chance they would rather do something less productive because on some level they don't like what they do that much.

Strip away the clickbait 'Germany begins' headline and it's 'a pro-UBI lobbying group adds 120 people to its latest trial'

You're making the hard assumption that, by distributing a UBI, people will just sit around and do nothing. There is no data to back this statement up, and it's very likely that people will actually work more while on UBI. UBI is designed to provide _choice_ for workers, not force them to do something they don't want to do.

For all we know, UBI could lead to solving some of the worlds biggest problems by giving people, who otherwise wouldn't be able to, the freedom to solve problems they're interested in, not just work some dead end job to barely make ends meet. You'd be surprised at how much better humans are at doing things when they actually like doing them.

Let's let the studies roll out before making assumptions. I do, however, believe these studies are much too removed from reality to prove much of anything. The dataset is much too small and 36 months isn't a great deal of time. We will see.

This is one of the best summaries of UBI that I have seen. UBI proponents are advised to read this carefully.