Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?

If you'd told me ten years ago I would ever support a basic income, I would have laughed. My thought would have been, "People getting paid without doing anything? Absurd!" But, in the past few years I've thoroughly changed my mind on this, and a number of other fronts. I now fully support a basic income (though I think a debate needs to happen about how much that basic income ought to be and how it ought to be funded, I'm well past the point where I think we should be discussing whether it ought to happen).

Partly this has been because I did some traveling (a lot of traveling; fulltime for four years, in a motorhome). I spent a lot of time in places that aren't Silicon Valley or other thriving metropolis. Detroit, Slab City, New Orleans, a variety of rural places. There are people who have been completely pushed out of the legitimate economy or merely scrape by at the very bottom, for a variety of reasons. And, it's not a small number of people. It is huge swaths of the population (as much as 39%, based on the poverty line, but more or less, depending on how you define it). That's not sustainable, ethical, or efficient.

The CEO to worker pay gap has also contributed to my changing view on this. When a full-time (or part-time who holds another job) Walmart worker doesn't earn enough to rent a tiny apartment and pay for basic expenses, while the CEO makes orders of magnitude more, it becomes apparent there needs to be other ways to push the income down. If corporations won't behave ethically by choice, there needs to be outside pressure. Increasing efficiency and increasing revenue has not resulted in improved quality of life for workers; and that is mostly reflected across the board. It is not merely egregious examples like Walmart. Even many "good" companies have horrible pay gaps and little loyalty to their employees (while expecting loyalty and dedication in return).

And, that doesn't really even begin to address the changing nature of work. Many skilled work roles, those jobs that the American middle class was built on, have disappeared from the US economy in my lifetime, and this hasn't been reflected in a subsequent increase in pay or benefits for lower-skilled labor jobs that replaced them (and some of those jobs were not replaced...they just don't exist anymore). All while real estate prices and rents have gone through the roof. So, again, large swaths of the population, the kind of people who could have been middle class home owners in previous generations with reasonable retirement savings, are now renters who live paycheck to paycheck, or worse, live on credit. There's certainly room to talk about why the real estate market is as lopsided as it is. And, there may be room to talk about increasing skills in people who currently work low-skill jobs (though, evidence indicates there are many categories of job that are simply not going to exist in the future). Again, it's not sustainable, ethical, or efficient to have so many people living in poverty.

Finally, we already spend a couple trillion dollars on welfare programs. The increased cost for extending that type of benefit to everyone, while removing the bureaucracy of maintaining the existing programs (eligibility compliance and case workers, etc.), is actually not as dramatic as it first seems.

I like the idea of a basic income on principle, and this article has some great arguments for it. (Though I agree it is far from being paid for--and a land tax essentially means it only gets paid to the landless, so you'd need to exempt "reasonable" owner-occupied land).

But let's simulate how it would look in the real world. I think mindless consumerism would go way up, especially in the lower classes. Advertising in all media would simply encourage this. The well-off would buy stock in Walmart and low end electronics makers with their extra income, thus capturing the income of the less savvy. Without local manufacturing, much of the distributed income would go to China. Paternalism and its religious affiliates would rise up again to capture the income of the not-yet-emancipated (by that I mean women and children). With perceived abundance and linear income, the birth rate would rise.

So I think we need to solve some of these issues first. Education should be the beneficiary for the first trillion in new taxes. Hopefully that could mitigate the consumerism and prompt more entrepreneurialism, as well as reduce the paternalism and birth rate. As mentioned, doing universal health care right would amount to the same thing as a universal income as well (more security, less worry, more productivity). So I wonder if those two aren't bigger priorities.

The appeal to UBI for me has always, apart from being a good way to stop welfare traps and increase income equality now, is that it marks the beginning of the new phase in our economic system: one from a cash-work model to a material-existence model. I do subscribe to the total job automation theory being every so increasingly talked about, and what these proposals tell me is that government and to a larger extent society is beginning to see that we can indeed provide for everyone using our productivity gains. The cash part of the deal I think is just a carry-on from our ageing economic system that will be replaced by some other form of value transfer mechanism which honestly, I can't imagine what would look like.

I'd probably use it to work on personal projects for 12 months at a time after doing consulting rounds.

There's been a few aid projects towards impoverished villages in Africa that have a BI setup. There's also Alaska and some other natural resource based payments.

In general I think BI is the social safety net equivalent of Greenspun's Tenth Rule:

Any sufficiently complicated social welfare program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Basic Income.

So getting there may be a case of slowly making existing benefits more universal, more cash based etc. I think one suggestion was to just keep lowering the retirement age as BI and state pensions are roughly analogous.