What does the unconditional basic income really achieve? The results of the first long-term study in Germany - to read, listen and share.
After three years of studies and extensive data analysis, the results are finally in. Instead of saying "We’d like to know," we can now confidently say, "We know."
Now we would like to share this knowledge with you. Below, we have summarised the key findings into five key topics. For more information on the research structure, please visit the study design page.
Our study shows that a basic income leads to the fulfilment of material needs and active wealth creation among recipients. However, they don’t just spend it on themselves.
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This kind of thing pops up now and again but the psychology is completely different to if basic income was actually universal and expected to continue in the long-term.
Of course people don't quit their jobs and careers because they are part of a small group enrolled in a 3-year scientific study. Human behaviour is non-linear.
The study doesn't cover the likely feedback effects on the broader economy that a universal rollout would have (increase in the money supply) or the broader socio-cultural changes that would likely accompany it.
In short: scale matters for this kind of thing. Some things just can't be tested ahead of time empirically.
> Of course people don't quit their jobs and careers because they are part of a small group enrolled in a 3-year scientific study.
Except the study did show people quitting their jobs at a higher rate. But they mostly switched to new jobs instead of becoming unemployed. Of course people given the choice between working less or making more money usually choose the money. People who choose otherwise are already part-timing/episodically employed/on unemployment benefits/getting subsidized by their family.
Presumably there's a level of UBI where most people wouldn't see the need to work anymore, but if they quit permanently, this will reduce the supply of goods, increasing prices and limiting how much UBI can buy, to the point where people are incentivized to start working again. So it's a self-regulating system. Of course it would be less disruptive to start with a very low UBI that gradually increases, instead of starting high and letting inflation sort out the rest.
I think the nuance here is that the income in Universal Basic Income is a stand-in for "everyone's basic needs should be met". But income doesn't guarantee that, because prices go up and down for a variety of reasons.
What people actually want is Universal Basic Buying Power. I should be able to get a roof over my head, get food and an education. It sucks that it's this complicated but in terms of government policy sometimes UBI is cash handouts, other times it should be supply-side investments, and as the original commenter laid out, none of these research experiments are running that experiment.
I mean, even that's something of a misconception. Let's start with an axiom: there are enough people and resources, both locally and universally, to provide every human being with enough to eat every day and a safe place to sleep every night (acts of God notwithstanding). That's an objective truth; technologically and logistically, we are there as a civilization. So a guarantee of access to something that already exists is a matter of policy, not economy. The doomsayers are just wrong on this one, unless the first act of UBI recipients would be to burn farms, blow up the rail network, and release pests into vacant housing, or something (though I don't doubt that this scenario is precisely what they expect; after so many studies, it's safe to call anti-UBI rhetoric a rationalization of unsubstantiated class hysteria).
And we have been producing enough to feed and house everyone for about 40 years now. Henry Ford introduced 5 day workweek and with the productivity trend we should be working one day a week by now.
It is not happening because in eyes of capitalism a person is only valuable and accepted if they have an occupation that produce value, whether needed or not.
Consequence of that, 50% of workforce is “bullshit jobs” made to keep people employed, like marketing, finance and such.
Because people sadly are brainwashed to be working from cradle to grave, it will take few generations for UBI to become unconditional and part of life, like we have with free healthcare (not you, U.S.).
By danudey 2025-04-1015:59 In a similar vein: a lot of studies have shown that most of the cost of a UBI could usually be paid for by two existing expenditures, the first being current welfare programs, such as employment insurance, welfare, disability benefits, etc., and the second being the cost of the time and labor the government has to pay for to ensure that the programs in point one only go to a limited subset of people who qualify.
In other words, we're spending so much on making sure that most people don't get social programs that we could fund a huge chunk of just giving those people social programs instead.
Likewise, we spend more on policing and jailing individuals convicted of minor crimes than it would cost to implement social programs to reduce the amount of crime in the first place; the US spends more on their medical system per capita than most (any?) other countries because it all goes to insurance companies whose job is, ostensibly, to pay for medical treatment, but who spend a large amount of it on departments dedicated to not paying for medical treatment.
Studies have shown that a lot of people (mostly right-leaning individuals) would rather go without something that could benefit them (e.g. healthcare, UBI, etc.) if it meant that people they see as "undeserving" (the poor, the homeless, immigrants) also didn't get it, so there are a lot of people out there who would rather spend money keeping people from having positive outcomes than spend less money to give those people positive outcomes.
By BriggyDwiggs42 2025-04-106:44 I’m actually blown away by that article. Fucking clever shit. Gonna save the other parts and read em later.
> Universal Basic Buying Power. I should be able to get a roof over my head, get food and an education. It sucks that it's this complicated but in terms of government policy sometimes UBI is cash handouts, other times it should be supply-side investments,
I think AI could make UBI + moving to a lower cost of living much more appealing if it solves education and healthcare. The housing is solved for by market forces.
First tier, high cost of living should be for high earners, singles or childless people, they should pay more taxes while second tier areas should offer UBI, and should generally subsidise people having children and augment the kind of high grade services first tier locations have, especially education and healthcare with AI. Or at least that's 90% of the reason me and many people I know don't move to smaller towns
> First tier, high cost of living should be for high earners, singles or childless people, they should pay more taxes while second tier areas should offer UBI, and should generally subsidise people having children
That seems unfair to me. Why should singles and childless people subsidise people with children?
> Why should singles and childless people subsidise people with children?
My point was mainly that that kind of first tier city would attract those kind of people, not specifically that they should be targeted.
If you lived in a 2nd tier zone you shouldn't pay extra in taxes even if you're childless.
But specifically to your question, I do think that it's fair that childless people should pay more taxes, because having a stable population is a requirement for a stable society and single/childless people aren't doing their part.
That duty can be offloaded to parents with more children, but they should be compensated for that.
You can frame it whatever you want -- they pay more taxes, parents pay less taxes, parents get tax rebates, parents get higher UBI per child, the outcome is the same.
I do think that first tier cities leach and profit from the work of the parents, educators of the people who migrate there (and generally the whole area -- it takes a village to raise a child), profit from exorbitant property taxes so, I think the only way to solve this curse is higher taxes (if it's required) on those areas and subsidized living in less desirable places -- provided that those 2nd tier places produce competent citizens.
By HPsquared 2025-04-106:41 Progressive income tax already does this "taxing first-tier cities a higher percentage" thing. The tax bands are the same in all cities, so people living in the cheaper, low pay provincial cities already pay less tax as a proportion of income. This effect is very stark in comparing London to the rest of the UK.
Why should singles and childless people subsidise people with children?
children are the future of our society. even in today's system, children will be the ones paying your pension when you retire. putting that burden on parents alone is what is unfair. how would you like your pension to be measured based on the number of children you raised? maybe if you have no children you shouldn't get any pension at all?
By singleshot_ 2025-04-1014:133 reply Where did you get the idea anyone will be paying my pension when I retire?
Capital Accumulation without labor is a fiction. If nobody had any more children all stocks would gradually decline to zero
By singleshot_ 2025-04-1114:07 Pension is also a fiction (as in, I do not have one).
do you expect not to get any pension at all and just live on your own savings? do you live on a farm growing your own food?
you can't live in this society without relying on others, and they can't live without relying on you. and unless you want humanity to die out, future generations need our support.
By singleshot_ 2025-04-1114:061 reply This is more of a "100% certain" situation than an "expect" situation. Are you mixing pensions up with 401ks and social security?
i was using it as a general term for whatever money you receive after you retire except personal investments or savings. i could not find out how 401ks work, specifically i did not find out whether 401k works like any other pension scheme or not. the wikipedia page on pensions does not say that 401k is not a pension, therefore i figure it is included in the definition.
i just checked the 401k page, and it says: a 401(k) plan is an employer-sponsored, defined-contribution, personal pension (savings) account.
so it's a pension.
but what we call it doesn't really matter. more important is the question if the payout depends on future generations paying in. in my brief search i could not tell whether the 401k is protected against that or if it even can be protected. but if it is i'll have to retract my claim. my apologies.
By pj_mukh 2025-04-1014:44 Basic social security yield math.
By euroderf 2025-04-109:38 > I should be able to get a roof over my head, get food and an education.
I have a theory that every nation with a natural advantage in some product range should make it available as a birthright.
For example, Finland's relative endowment/strength is forestry products and paper production. So every citizen should be able to claim a monthly allowance, at nominal charge or for free, of TP, paper towels, and writing paper / notebooks. Contracted by the government via a bid process.
By meinersbur 2025-04-0921:303 reply It also matters what jobs they change to.
There is a documentary out there showing someone who could quit their regular job and become an artist thanks to an UBI pilot (Canada IIRC). It is presented as a positive example in that they did not become lazy, but just work something different and still make revenue close to what they earned on their job by selling art.
How many people will become artists with UBI introduced nationally? Who is going to buy all that art?
By dclowd9901 2025-04-0923:27 There's lots of different kinds of art, some of it more commercially viable than others. Consider 3D designers selling print models, people like myself who are interested in restoring old cars or other endeavors that are artistically rewarding and aren't just painting or sculpting. Hell, people seem to do pretty well currently as content creators on YouTube.
My point is immediately jumping to the idea everyone's going to be pumping out shitty paintings and music that no one will want is lacking in imagination.
What I'm worried about is: who will produce our food? Who will fix our potholes? Who will fix our cars?
By mschuster91 2025-04-100:52 Food production is already absurdly automated. At least for grains, in theory you don't even need humans to drive the tractors on the fields any more, drones and RTK GPS systems automate all of it from seed to harvest. Cattle is fed and milked fully automated as well, with precise tracking of how much each cow ate and how much milk it yielded. Chicken also don't need much human work to lay eggs.
Most societies up to industrialization had a primary (i.e. agricultural) sector of around 50-70% of employees (numbers vary). Today, it's more like 1-2%, and the number is bound to fall - especially when lab-grown meat really takes off, because slaughtering and butchering farm animals _at the moment_ cannot be done by robots at scale and IMHO it's more likely that lab-grown meat succeeds before we entrust sharp knives to robots to actually kill animals.
> Who will fix our cars?
Modern cars - particularly electric cars - are much less maintenance intensive. That's part of why many established car brands are in serious trouble with their historically grown dealerships... "life long oil fills" and general improvements in technology already cut back on a lot of income from repair and maintenance of dealerships, and electric cars have far fewer failure points (other than crappy software) than ICE cars. We simply won't need anywhere close to the current number of service points, and we also won't need gas stations with trucks that fill up their tanks as the cars will be charged through the existing grid.
> Who will fix our potholes?
I 'member a story of some bloke holding up a sign like "I filled the potholes, pay me instead of your taxes". Local politics is on a downward slope across the Western world (with a common factor being the central government depriving local governments of revenue or loading off expenses to local levels), I think we're going to see a lot more of such incidents.
In any case, the price of trades labor will have to increase to be an effective incentive. And if you ask me, better pay the tradespeople than the vampires and vultures of Wall Street. At least the tradespeople do something to keep this society alive, the banksters do not.
By xboxnolifes 2025-04-100:282 reply The economic incentive doesn't just vanish because people have a little more money. Notwithstanding, a lot of people enjoy the work of being a mechanic.
By marcusverus 2025-04-1015:511 reply > The economic incentive doesn't just vanish because people have a little more money.
The incentives are changed dramatically, though. The unworkability of the plan comes down to a very simple question: Why work for forty years, scrimping and saving to afford a meagre retirement, when a meagre retirement is on offer the moment you turn 18?
By xboxnolifes 2025-04-1017:101 reply People have the option now to live like the meagre retirement of this proposed UBI while working, saving a ton more, and retire with a lot more than this UBI in far fewer years than 40. Instead, they spend more, because people always want more stuff. A meager retirement is not appealing to most 18 year olds.
Or with this proposed UBI, why wouldn't people work 20 years and have a good retirement instead of the a meager one out of the gate? Why not work 40 for a great one?
By marcusverus 2025-04-122:43 The median 65 year old has 200k in retirement savings. That's 8k per year at a 4% safe withdrawal rate. Hardly worth 40 years of work.
> A meager retirement is not appealing to most 18 year olds.
The option of shacking up with some buds and playing videophones all day will be utterly irresistible for many (if not most) male high school grads. Basically the college experience, for free, forever.
By Ferret7446 2025-04-105:061 reply Is there enough to sustain the entire economy though?
By xboxnolifes 2025-04-105:36 Well, we're apparently significantly more wealthy as a society and individuals than XXX years ago. Yet, most people still seem to be working and the economy is stronger than ever (On a multi-century scale).
By anonymech 2025-04-1013:03 I like fixing cars, I enjoy doing it for my friends and prefer to do it for free.
I love to do a little paving, once in a while, it's surprisingly satisfying.
I actually really like to work, I just hate having to be employed.
I expect that I'm fairly normal in that.
By a1o 2025-04-100:52 I wouldn’t mind farming if it wasn’t for the need of money. There’s a lot of risk involved. I also don’t mind fixing cars, it’s just in today’s world I can work and make more money in an office - and it requires enough hours that I can’t do mechanical work at all, there’s not enough time and I have to pay for those.
By tbossanova 2025-04-1011:011 reply I will happily fix potholes and produce food for UBI, after being horribly burned out by 20 years in software companies.
By jayGlow 2025-04-1017:42 Couldn't you do that now already? you wouldn't make as much money as on software but construction or farming are both viable careers.
> Who will fix our cars?
Somewhat related: when do we get a truly user-serviceable automobile, something like a four-wheeled motorized version of a Fairphone or Librem. Set a max speed on them to simplify the safety requirements. Urban putt-putts.
Then you'll find enough mechanics.
By jjav 2025-04-118:50 > when do we get a truly user-serviceable automobile, something like a four-wheeled motorized version of a Fairphone or Librem
Those used to be ubiquitous! Today none are available.
Buy a largely any car from the 60s and it will be fully user-serviceable essentially forever.
By ForHackernews 2025-04-0921:362 reply Who cares if anyone buys the art? In a world with basic income where people didn't have to worry about survival wages, people could make art just because they were moved to make art.
I don't know, they went from productive work (someone paying them to do it) to unproductive work.
This is the old Keynesian argument I never bought that you can pay people to dig ditches and fill them back in and it would stimulate the economy.
By ludston 2025-04-0922:59 To be fair, there is a massive percentage of non-productive jobs that are mostly security guards for goods and locations, and many inefficient roles related to ticket clipping, inefficient distribution and marketing that all stimulate the economy without being productive.
By h2zizzle 2025-04-0922:45 "still make revenue close to what they earned on their job by selling art."
Read more closely.
By specialist 2025-04-1011:56 Arts & entertainment is (at least) 1% of USA's GDP. Roughly $1 trillion / year.
Production of culture seems important and worthwhile to me.
Probably apocryphal: UK's (then generous) dole led to the British Invasion (eg The Beatles).
>>went from productive work (someone paying them to do it) to unproductive work.
Umm, that is literally wrong, by your own definition.
>>work something different and still make revenue close to what they earned on their job by selling art.
I.e., they went from an employer paying them to do work to a variety of clients/customers paying them to do different work of nearly the same value.
OFC, if everyone did it, the price of art might decline. Or demand might go up. Or both, or neither. We don't know. But either way, the example subject did NOT convert from productive to unproductive work.
Was it:
or:$X from old job ~= $Y from art-gig$X from old job ~= $Y from art-gig + $Z from UBIBy toss1 2025-04-1014:19 Good qstn. The phrasing does leave room for ambiguity, but "make revenue close to" certainly indicates meaning closer to "$X from old job ~= $Y from art-gig"
>>work something different and still make revenue close to what they earned on their job by selling art
By unclad5968 2025-04-0922:071 reply And where will the money for UBI come from when everyone quits their job for non-income generating hobbies?
By ForHackernews 2025-04-0922:13 Tax the AI companies? Their bots are built on the plundered wealth of all mankind and that wealth belongs to the commonweal by right.
It's funny that this board can easily imagine AI destroying humanity but can't imagine a world where it enables them to quit their job.
By spidersenses 2025-04-0921:02 >Of course it would be less disruptive to start with a very low UBI that gradually increases
This is a very good point that I haven't even heard made by proponents of this idea before. Thanks!
By TulliusCicero 2025-04-0923:511 reply > Except the study did show people quitting their jobs at a higher rate. But they mostly switched to new jobs instead of becoming unemployed.
Right, GP was clearly referring to to
> Does a basic income make people lazy? This assumption has been widely discussed, but never substantiated. The Basic Income Pilot Project demonstrates that the opposite is true.
If you knew you could get by forever without a job, that's very different from having a 3-year period where you can get by without a job. Especially when it comes to people coming of age. Think about the average 18 year old: if they could just 'get by' for a long time, it'd be awfully tempting.
By em-bee 2025-04-1013:36 i'd argue that many will get bored after a few years. encourage everyone to do something meaningful and the problem will go away.
I remember living somewhere where native americans got guaranteed income each month.
There was a group of them that would spend their life outside the liquor store, sitting on the curb drinking.
By briantakita 2025-04-105:121 reply Alcoholism happens to people who have jobs as well. Though there's a policy of being sober at work which limits drinking to off hours.
Another possibility is that Basic Income alone doesn't solve all problems. Life direction & perceived opportunity to better oneself is needed. Basic Income may enable destructive behavior. But the underlying root cause may still be present even if the person is employed.
Most people need more than mere "opportunity to better oneself". It's almost always a shortage of motivation. UBI would reduce this motivation, I believe.
By tbossanova 2025-04-1011:08 The current state of things is insanely demotivating, so I wouldn’t be so sure
By AStonesThrow 2025-04-106:141 reply Native Americans may be the best modern example of a group who's poorly habituated to urban living settings.
For centuries, White Man has tried to assimilate the indigeneous into cityfolk and teach them our languages and our ways, and there's been so much resistance to that. In fact, I propose that most human beings don't like being corralled into individualistic "cells" and so far removed from "nature" or subsistence farming/shepherding that we completely lose touch with other living things. Urban living was such a moral affront to indigeneous cultures, and even the Irish were sort of upset by the imposition, y'know?
Many homeless people on the streets simply don't know how to live. They don't know how to care for a home, how to run a kitchen, how to keep their clothes clean, how to do medical care, how to run household finances and pay bills. They're feral, essentially: how many people adopt feral cats or wild animals? They're nightmares.
Anyone who simply says "housing first" or "UBI" will solve poverty and homelessness, you're in an ivory tower and you've never been on-the-ground with actual people who can't be housed. Look at a population of 100 and you'll discern 100 reasons for that homelessness and poverty.
I'm lucky and privileged that I got independent living situation under control and was able to rehabilitate and habituate to a sort of ordinary middle-class lifestyle, because it was essentially reverting to my childhood environment. Other people came from abuse, addiction, and shitty circumstances, and they have no idea what it's like to be clean and clear-headed.
The reason that entitlements are this way currently is to ensure that qualified people can get and keep their benefits. Section 8 HUD housing has a lot of strict rules around the owners, landlords, and the tenants, and learning those rules helped me know what a decent and well-maintained household looks like. Maintaining HUD standards was paramount to me keeping that assistance.
Likewise food stamps (SNAP) can't be used for liquor or non-nutritious goods and other food programs deliver wholesome stuff you can use and eat, so it sets good examples to otherwise feral humans that it's important not to live on Doritos and beer, because they will try!
UBI is absurd to me where if you're just handing me fistfuls of cash I can do anything I want, and people will run with that, I guarantee ya. UBI is no solution to the symptoms or root causes of poverty.
Personally, I believe we need a return to collectivism, an end to rugged individuality, and more communal-style housing situations. Independent living is a real grind, because of so many responsibilities, and I have tons of neighbors but no friends. Many people would do better with shared spaces like kitchens, bathrooms, cafeterias, but those types of residences are essentially illegal in the US by means of zoning, except in unique circumstances like a special work-train-live program. And placing feral or mentally ill people into shared spaces can be a recipe for disaster, unless it's a professional institutional setting, and that's precisely what the Reagan administration eliminated from the "bad old days".
By tbossanova 2025-04-1011:13 Amen
> Except the study did show people quitting their jobs at a higher rate. But they mostly switched to new jobs instead of becoming unemployed.
Didn't something similar happened during Covid due to stimulus checks? People were confident on applying for new jobs since they had the stimulus check as a backup.
By mc3301 2025-04-100:21 Yeah, this kind of mobility (or lack thereof) is what keeps a lot of poor people poor. Moving is expensive, leaving your current job is expensive, job searching is expensive, upskilling is expensive... Most people don't have the financial freedom to do any of those, thus they are stuck. This also means that their potential is never fully met, because they just gotta makes ends meet.
By SoftTalker 2025-04-0921:16 You could argue it's a self-regulating system as well with UBI at zero.
I'll give you a counter example. "Retirement."
Nominally retirement is "forever" in that once you are retired your pension/savings/whatever is funding your existence needs. Having lived most of my life in the SF Bay area I've watched as my cohort came here as college grads, went through the various tech life cycles, and then aged out into "retirement." I put it in quotes because some retired voluntarily, others did not. Involuntary retirement or "funemployement" as the euphemism goes, was typically below the level of flexibility that they had imagined they would have being retired.
Various life events, health issues, marital issues, Etc. spread the spectrum even further. As a result the 'basic income' for this cohort ranges from just below 'covering groceries, utilities, and rent in a low cost of living area' to an annual travel budget, replacement budget for cars/boats/etc, and possibly a second property with some 'feature' (like a ski cabin, a beach bungalow, etc).
What is consistent across the spectrum is a desire to "do something productive with their time." That skews towards volunteer work if their basic life needs are met, piecework if having extra money would meet some currently unmet needs. I don't think I know anyone who could sit in the rocking chair on the patio every day and watch the sun come up and go down, or spend every day at the golf course or some other leisure activity, choose to take that path.
That said, pretty much everyone I know who has retired took an extended amount of time (typically months) to 'unwind.' Once unwound, life seems to assert itself.
Now I don't think this is scientific, its a very specific group of people. Generally professionals who worked in office jobs vs trades. And a number of them 'fail' at retirement which has them going back to work because they didn't have sufficient tools for creating their own direction or something. But laziness isn't a trait I've seen. A completely different direction perhaps, but a direction rather than standing still.
By jaggederest 2025-04-101:02 And, to point out, these are people coming to the end of their effective working careers, with things like medical problems and disability to inhibit their productivity. The idea that, given some paltry basic income ala current social security payment levels, young adults would just bail out is pretty strange to me. People already more or less have that option through disability and not very many people utilize it. I would expect to see something in that range, certainly below 10%, if we had a minimal basic income.
By missedthecue 2025-04-0919:578 reply yeah, there are basically three questions people have for UBI.
1. Does it cause inflation
2. What is the impact on employment/productivity
3. Can we afford to tax ourselves to pay ourselves in a way that makes sense?
These studies answer none of these.
I'm personally most worried about increases in general income levels being soaked up by real estate holders. It's what we've seen happen in the SF bay area rents in response to tech fortunes. I don't see UBI actually increasing welfare much without a tax on land value to make landholding less profitable and redirecting the value of land into the UBI fund.
By serviceberry 2025-04-0920:183 reply I don't think capital has any special attachment to real estate specifically. It's just that we have policies that essentially require your money to be invested into something (because inflation); and we turned real estate into a safe investment asset through policies that create perpetual scarcity.
You can probably come up with policies that penalize real estate investments, but (a) it will just cause the investors to chase some other asset class, instead of redistributing wealth; (b) unless scarcity is addressed, it's unlikely that housing prices are going to drop. Landlords extract profits from the assets they hold, but they don't cause there to be fewer homes or apartments available.
By schmidtleonard 2025-04-0920:331 reply Why wouldn't they? It's an easy and profitable way to pump their property values. Obviously they make an exception when they stand to profit, but I invite you to attend any county zoning meeting ever if you think this doesn't happen. The meetings are nothing but catfights of this exact description.
I've always marveled at how it's 100% accepted to talk about poor people employing six dimensional chess and dubious strategies to scrape undeserved pennies from the system, but it's somehow unthinkable to even so much as contemplate the possibility that rich people are pulling obvious levers to extract millions. The double standard is absolutely wild.
By numpad0 2025-04-0920:39 Rent is charged monthly, and everyone consumes the value at the exact same pacing of 1/30th the rent per day. Consumers has no leverages, save for weak protections that won't be statistically significant, against price hikes. I think it's reasonable to assune it's more efficient at capturing UBI than regular commodities that can be rationed or splurged on.
> I don't think capital has any special attachment to real estate specifically
It's one of the few things that are real (ba-dum-tss). And given that demand for housing is inelastic, it'll absolutely absorb any extra money injected into the system as UBI.
Put differently: whatever you set UBI to, it'll always be just barely enough to cover rent on a shack today and not enough tomorrow.
One workable version of UBI was Communism (as implemented in the Soviet Union, not in modern-day China). There you explicitly take the fundamentals like housing out of the economic system and make it a crime to exchange them for money. Prices of staples are tightly controlled, and excess income is to be used for aspirational expenses. It turns out though that it's hard to implement in practice because without a way to regulate demand - the supply side tends to fall over.
By parpfish 2025-04-0921:05 as long as we're floating what-ifs...
what if UBI led people to think "i can go live wherever i want, regardless of job/market conditions"?
herds of young idealists and artist-types deciding to take over cheap realestate in rust-belt towns and rural areas because they no longer need to be next to a big urban center to 'make it'.
we started to see this during covid WFH, but true UBI would be even bigger
By mediaman 2025-04-0920:14 This only seems to be an issue if the marginal cost of building is too high to expand supply, though, right? Otherwise if people have more money, they bid up housing, then new stuff gets built, and supply profits decline.
Of course, restricting supply is a problem. I also think this logic might break down in tightly restricted areas that are already vertically built out - Manhattan, for example, because costs per housing unit tend to follow a U curve with respect to height, where they decline with density but start increasing again at very high density, but that's not an issue in most places.
By mgfist 2025-04-0920:16 This can broadly be alleviated by regulations that make it far cheaper and easier to build.
Currently, demand is the only access by which housing markets are dictated in heavily NIMBY areas like SF. Supply is an underused level due to cost and permitting issues.
By HenryBemis 2025-04-0920:34 The human nature. The moment UBI is set at X amount, the cheapest rents will jump, so will the price of a coffee, of a burger & fries in a fast-food, etc.
Greed will take over and try to get the _most_ out of the UBI as if we/you/they owe it to those people.
Wouldn't reducing the profitability of landholding via taxation discourage the creation of apartment buildings, thus reducing the supply of housing and making it more expensive?
By ipsento606 2025-04-0920:25 Georgists want building apartment buildings to be profitable based on the value of the building, not the land.
The idea would be that holding land becomes less profitable, but buying land for development becomes cheaper.
By schmidtleonard 2025-04-0920:27 It would make land cheaper and improve the profitability of doing the conversion. Paying people to sit on land is hilariously inefficient. Welfare for the rich.
By antisthenes 2025-04-0923:54 > increases in general income levels being soaked up by real estate holders
More than 200 million Americans own their home. They are your real estate holders. So what if they absorb some of these increases?
If your concern is housing for those who don't own a home yet then say that, and the solution to that isn't not doing basic income, but to relax the obsolete local zoning laws that require e.g. 1 acre per home in rural area or "nothing higher than 30ft" in suburban areas, basically flat out banning any density increases.
Fund a UBI from a land value tax. The more land rents increase the higher the UBI
By s1artibartfast 2025-04-0922:361 reply Land tax is one of the least ethical forms of taxation. It would be far better to fund it with income, sales, or capital gains taxes.
By stevenhuang 2025-04-107:563 reply Most economists argue the opposite, that LVT is more ethical and efficient than other forms of taxation.
By s1artibartfast 2025-04-1013:201 reply I don't think "most economists" have a favorable view of it. It is a fringe theory from the 1800s that has never been implemented.
It is super regressive and effectively replaces everything with a housing tax and food tax.
It would be a massive tax break for the rich. IP, stock, and service income would be tax free.
It is primarily popular with a narrow band of white collar technology workers because it would benefit them immensely as their 500k SWE salary become tax free to be picked up by some poor school teacher living next door.
By chgs 2025-04-116:52 Teacher can’t afford to live next door because a retired couple that bought for 2 times their salary in 1975 live in a million pound house. They instead rent an hour away and already pay a tax for land use, just they pay it to the land owner.
By chgs 2025-04-117:45 It basically says everyone has an equal share of the unimproved land in a country.
If you use more of your fair share you pay more. If you use less you receive an income.
Instead the ultra wealthy owns the land and receives the income.
Far more ethical than either no tax or taxing productive work.
By em-bee 2025-04-1013:43 i haven't read much about this, but i think that the point is that land taxes should incentivize people to make their land work ad produce an income. the problem is that this only works if you have lots of land that can be meaningfully exploited. if the tax is applied equally to every one then small landowners will suffer because you can't make a profit from a house and a garden that you live in yourself.
By gnfedhjmm2 2025-04-0920:12 “Based on nothing I disagree”
You could study various subsidy regimes during the COVID-19 pandemic to answer this question. Some regimes subsidized resouces like energy, whereas other regimes provided something like an universal basic income (ubi) to small businesses/freelancers who were unable to serve their customers during lockdown. Austria was on the ubi side and we had huge problems with Inflation afterwards
By LaundroMat 2025-04-104:34 I don't know whether you can tie that inflation to ubi-like measures(alone). The whole world suffered high inflation, not in the least because of the global disruption of the supply chain.
We need to get serious about wealth taxes. The amount of money locked up in assets and land is staggering and has been under taxed for far too long.
By y-curious 2025-04-0920:29 I agree with the sentiment, but it matters very much how it's implemented. You would need to find a way to keep the money in your country, while also taxing more. It's actually very complicated, but yes, I agree with the notion.
By HPsquared 2025-04-0921:34 Said assets and land are already being used though. It's just a case of people wanting to "redistribute" them.
By some1else 2025-04-0922:08 My questions are more along the lines of:
- Does it liberate people from meaningless employment? - Does it give a sufficient platform to people to bootstrap their own trade? - Does it give people the runway for meaningful creation / artistic self-actualization?By buu700 2025-04-0922:14 Agreed. It's better than no data, but I don't really see what a study like this can hope to prove one way or another. Giving a handful of people free money isn't UBI any more than the lottery is UBI. It doesn't provide any information about the macroeconomic effects of an actual universal income, or about how a lifetime guarantee of continued payments would impact behavior.
Personally, I think the necessity and viability of UBI will become apparent sooner than most would expect. If AI and related fields continue to advance at their current pace, at some point we'll be able to observe a clear trend toward an eventual government budget surplus paired with a mass unemployment crisis. Implementing a UBI or similar measure during that transitional period will be the only way to avoid a lot of unnecessary pain and societal upheaval.
This won't cause excess inflation because the payments will be backed by real economic output; the payments will only serve to keep demand in line with supply. Eventually, we'll get to the point where a UBI with annual raises and a balanced budget can coexist. A pessimistic outlook would be that this heralds the end of human innovation and ingenuity; I personally predict that it kicks off a renaissance of entrepreneurship, invention, and scientific breakthroughs that at least matches the relative progress of the 20th century.
By lawlessone 2025-04-0920:20 >1. Does it cause inflation
Our current system has inflation baked in, so im not sure how big an issue it is, so much as how much inflation?
By stego-tech 2025-04-0923:091 reply I argue the studies don't have to answer these questions, because we already have the (uncomfortable) answers.
> 1. Does it cause inflation
On its own, yes, it would create inflation if rolled out globally. However, this is why serious advocates of UBI also point out that we need policies that ensure it isn't turned into a wealth pump into the upper/ruling classes. This entails things like rent, margin, and price controls on necessities like food, shelter, healthcare, education, and transportation, which also requires substantial public investment in those areas to deter or discourage privatization of those necessities. In other words, it means pissing off every landlord, upscale grocer, private hospital, utility company, telecom, private university, rideshare company, rail company, and Taxi owner for the sake of the public good.
> 2. What is the impact on employment/productivity
Generally speaking, humans want to do something productive with their time - it's the definition of productivity that varies from person to person. Those who think solely in economic output will say that negative-profitability employment isn't of value, even if that output has knock-on positive effects in the economy (such as the disparaging compensation for teachers and first responders despite the immense value they create in the long run). It's also why people sneer at the homeless or panhandlers as being "problematic" and "undeserving" of assistance for failing to "pull themselves up [by their bootstraps]."
In reality, taking into account the whole picture, these sorts of individuals could (and studies show, often do) contribute to society better if they had support structures in place that prioritized long-term stability instead of quick KPIs for grant money. It could even be argued that UBI enabling humans to stay home and not work is itself a profitable exercise, since it removes friction from systems that those individuals might create by being forced to exist and interact with modern society and its lack of safeguards. Not only that, but the productivity gains could likely increase as we can finally eliminate "bullshit jobs" and give people the safety nets needed to start their own businesses instead - more restaurants, service experts, inventors, researchers, teachers, and other jobs that are high risk/low reward in the current system, wouldn't be in an economy with UBI and associated policies to provide for necessities and essentials.
> 3. Can we afford to tax ourselves to pay ourselves in a way that makes sense?
We can, but this is arguably the hardest opposition to surmount because it fundamentally means higher taxes on everyone, and that's a bitter medicine nobody wants to swallow. Countries with successful social safety nets have higher tax rates, but also higher quality of life as a result. Unfortunately, the current technocrats and their sycophants (not to mention their industrial predecessors and their decedents) have managed to convince a plurality of powerful people that the world would be perfect if everyone just worked harder and became billionaires themselves so we'd have no more poor people and thus no need for taxation in principle - a fantasy so high and lofty it makes the MCU look plausibly accurate.
It would mean building a society of high taxes, rigid policies, and a massive reduction in (or outright elimination of) loopholes for wealth preservation, especially across generations. It'd mean punishing hoarding of wealth, as that would (rightly) signal exploitation rather than success. These are things most people simply aren't ready for, because they still believe themselves to be one lottery ticket, one inheritance, one startup, one IPO, or one crypto boom away from being billionaires themselves, and don't want to accept that the outcome of the 99% is to work for the rest of their lives before dying in destitution of some form under the current system - a depressing reality to be sure, but all the more reason to change it.
So there you have it. If all you look at is the current system as-is and shoehorning UBI into it, then obviously you have a slam dunk case for why it's a bad thing. UBI advocates like myself, however, acknowledge that it's merely one component in a larger transformation of society itself towards more equitable outcomes, one where colorful pieces of paper are inherently devalued for necessities like food, shelter, healthcare, education, and transportation, while increased in value for actual luxuries. It's an inversion of our present society for the betterment of all, and that's why it's incompatible with the questions you raise above (which seek to preserve a broken status quo).
> This entails things like rent, margin, and price controls on necessities...
> substantial public investment in those areas...
> discourage privatization...
Ah, so we are just looking at communism with extra steps. Good to know. UBI, despite its size, was just the motte all along. Thanks for telling us the bailey.
By stego-tech 2025-04-1012:191 reply If you’re going to deliberately straw man someone’s argument with cherry-picked quotes just to justify your pre-existing and ill-informed biases against a topic while simultaneously demonstrating your ignorance of said topic, then you’re going to live your life in the grays.
By arduanika 2025-04-113:59 Okay. Have fun planning the whole economy. Let me know how it goes.
Well the study at least answers your second point, it shows that people are enjoying their work more, and that they change jobs more often (ie take more risks) and stay as employed as before
and #3 at least as already been well modelled economically, UBI replaces many other welfare programs, so we can definitely afford it
> Well the study at least answers your second point, it shows that people are enjoying their work more, and that they change jobs more often (ie take more risks) and stay as employed as before
As GGP said, this doesn't compare. There's even nothing magically non-linear about it: people stay employed, because they know the UBI study will only last a few years, after which they'll need to get back to normal. It makes no sense to interrupt your career for it, as the "hole in your CV" will just turn into a severe and compounding disadvantage in lost years and experience.
By HenryBemis 2025-04-0920:571 reply It's not just that. I fear tha UBI will be 'frozen in time', so let's say it's something insanely generous, EUR 5000 per month. After that happens, every month we will have a record inflation, and soon enough the EUR 5000 will rent you Harry Potter's staircase-'flat' and 3 pizzas.
The only way I see this being sustainable is get as far as possible from the big cities, buy a tiny piece of land, by a durable tiny home, buy solar panels, get a tablet with all Gutenberg books, and find a soulmate that will follow you to that journey.
No kids, no private schools, no parties, no nothing. Everything will be swallowed by inflation.
Yup, I 100% agree. This is my worry too. And it goes beyond real estate market and landlords - they are the obvious infinitely deep money sinkholes of society, but even if housing magically became free and available to everyone, I believe the sudden inflation would happen anyway.
I believe this to be a fundamental feature of free market economy in general. It's something I started realizing many years ago, and thought about a lot ever since; in the last year, I distilled that belief into a concise phrase I now use for this:
The market constantly adjusts to keep the average disposable income to zero.
Except now I realized that "average" is the wrong measure here, I should be saying "median", and also I've been mistakenly using the term "disposable income" (which actually means just after-tax income) to refer to "discretionary income" (what you're left with after covering taxes, bills, and essentials). Which leads me to the New and Better, Updated, Version 2.0 of my economic theory:
The market constantly adjusts to keep median discretionary income near zero.
I'd imagine this is an obvious thing that's already been named 100 years ago, but so far my research only pointed me to things like "neutrality of money", and some specific examples of my statement holding, yet nothing that covers it entirely.
(EDIT: in the unlikely case I'm not an idiot, and that this phrasing was not used/named before, I welcome credit; inquiries from the Nobel Foundation should be directed to my e-mail address, which is in my profile.)
By HenryBemis 2025-04-1315:21 > The market constantly adjusts to keep the average disposable income to zero.
Oh yes!! This very thing!! A quick DDG search didn't return anything, but yes, 300% yes. This is the rule/law. Once people get some money, forces tend to (try and) take it away.
EDIT: Ideally, your disposable income must be a little less than zero, so your needs/wants outpace your income, so you get a credit card with $2k limit, then you expand that to $5k limit, and that to $7k limit, until you cannot any more.
EDIT2: I once dated a lady (the most beautiful woman I've dated in my life) and she was in debt for €40k, ALL spent in clothes. She was SO gorgeous that when I feel for her she was wearing a €50 jeans and a €10 white tshirt. She walked in to the room and people stopped breathing. After 1.5 years of dating when I wanted to get very serious with her and she told me her 'dark secret', I suggested a Dave-Ramsey-baby-steps plan to pay off her €40k debt but to chop up her credit cards (and I would gladly generously contribute to pay off that debt - but with a different lifestyle). Long story short.. I haven't seen her in ~15 years :)
And #3 implies that it's not going to cause inflation, any more than those other welfare programs do now.
In general, as long as we're funding it with taxes instead of by printing money, it's not going to cause any extra inflation.
By jay_kyburz 2025-04-0920:37 If somebody offered me 1200 GBP a month, tax free, no strings attached, guaranteed for the rest of my life, there is no way I would continue working for somebody else. I would tinker around with open source and pet projects for the rest of my life.
That's almost twice the aged pension here in Australia. (550 GBP)
I guess I would also need some iron clad guarantee that the cost of living would not skyrocket.
This is the UBI experiment I want to see:
The government creates a new currency called $UBI, with the same legal tender status as the official currency for that country ($FIAT). I.e. people can use it to pay taxes, and people are required to accept it when doing commerce. Both currencies exist in parallel.
In the true spirit of ubi, everyone is entitled to an equal amount of it, and no one should be worse off by it. So they need to issue the currency new currency to give away.
They set up a system so everyone gets the same amount of money, at the same time, for maximum fairness. Everyone's income just goes up, equally.
$UBI officially has 1:1 parity to $FIAT, and this parity is used to calculate how much they'll need to "print" out at a given month. Let's say it's living_wage*population_size. That amount can be adjusted once a year by factoring in the government reserves built up exclusively from tax returns. In other words, the monetary base is a known, deterministic quantity.
They allow free exchange between $FIAT and $UBI, but the government does not officially exchanges it. They also allow people to set prices to their products and services freely.
By stevage 2025-04-0921:55 What is the benefit of all this extra complexity?
It's funny, people like you will say a study is too small and focused to be worthwhile.
But then we have the case of Alaska, an entire state receiving a yearly stipend(basic income). And the same type of people will say well it's too broad you can't possibly pinpoint any direct effects. https://www.ktoo.org/2015/02/20/alaska-tops-gallups-index-we...
Science is not made for perfection and many studies are _not possible_ it doesn't mean there's nothing useful to gain from it for policy makers. It's also simpler to study smaller groups than effects on entire countries.
By floxy 2025-04-0921:31 Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend for 2024: $1,702, or $141.83/month
By exe34 2025-04-0920:13 > “It’s awesome! I wasn’t even aware that we were even close to being number 1, so seeing that was really nice to know,” Brown said
It seems to have come as a shock to a lot of them to find out they were so happy.
That's right. Community wide Universal Basic Income would cause price rises for shelf goods, negating the intended beneficial effect.
As the value of money is always relative to its scarcity. More money held by all individuals always leads to higher prices, because it leads to money being worth less. Life only becomes less expensive when making more money than others. This is a basic dynamic of how money works, at its most fundamental level.
Society would need price controls to stop shelf prices from rising, and to maintain the beneficial effect of UBI (being able to afford more goods). At that point shortages are incoming, and UBI income functionally transforms from money to credits for goods. Even if it is still called money. Credits implies a limit on how much goods people are allotted, even if given credits / money to redeem said allotment. The government needs to decide how much in goods each individual is allotted.
This is where it gets bad. Communist propaganda practice is to promise that the communist society will allot a maximum amount goods per person out of its GDP, implying an evenly distributed yet relatively well off populace. Visualize a pie that is cut in large slices and completely distributed.
The rub is that the government gets to keep any part of the pie that is not distributed, and so its incentive is to distribute the least amount of the pie and the smallest slices. Which is what we see in practice. People given the minimum of their collective production value to sustain their existence. With the government hoarding the rest. Slaves in all but name.
The government now has a taste of control over wealth distribution for part of its GDP, which it enacts via entitlement over some production value of work and private business. Whatever production value is left for the private sector economy is now tempting for the government to also take over and minimally distribute in the same manner, because again the government gets to keep much of the money. Private business and employment begin to become dirty words.
We live in a World that is dominated by the fundamental nature of money, some would call it a fallen world. Making a low amount of money feels like a slave's existence.
However, at least in a free market economy there is a type of escape hatch from that existence should someone figure out how to provide society with relatively more value than others. Whereas in a socialist society, that escape hatch tends to legally close as the years tick by and the personal allotment of goods declines.
> That's right. Community wide Universal Basic Income would cause price rises for shelf goods, negating the intended beneficial effect.
If that were true, supermarkets in wealthy areas would be much more expensive than in poor areas, but they aren't.
No one likes overpaying for groceries, and a modest government income isn't going to change that.
By lr4444lr 2025-04-0922:25 Supermarkets in poor areas get reliable cash flow from EBT - it is arguably UBI in action. Its patrons tend to have lower rates of vehicle ownership and free time to seek better priced alternatives.
By bravura 2025-04-0919:53 Quantity has a quality all of its own.
By neilwilson 2025-04-102:121 reply Particularly when they ignore the largest data set we already have - the state pensions.
They are a basic income within a fixed exchange rate area by age rather than location. There are trillions of data points across decades of provision. With compulsory retirement and changes removing compulsory retirement.
The results are clear. People tend to stop working once they receive it, even if they have the option to continue.
An inconvenient truth.
And the result is that the age the pension becomes available has to be pushed higher to sustain it. Therefore the alternative time uses are insufficiently productive to be of help overall.
If it was a viable proposition there should be a virtuous cascade driving the pension age down, not up.
funny, this sister comment here makes the exact opposite argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43639593
but even if you are right about retired people stopping to work, you also need to consider their age, and maybe the feeling that they have earned it after working for decades?
the same isn't true for young people, so the comparison is not conclusive.
By neilwilson 2025-04-1016:55 What age do you think that “feeling” kicks in and how do you “feel” about policy operating according to vague feelings?
I’m old enough to have income generating assets but not enough to call it a day completely. Reduce the state pension age to 18 (which is what a Universal Basic Income is) and I will.
Then you’ll be working to support me and the tax will have to be high enough to force you to generate a surplus that can be passed on to me.
That’s how UBI will work in reality.
By numpad0 2025-04-0920:00 will it become a capped negative sales tax, in a way? I don't see how amount of currency smaller than individual UBI amount make tangible sense under its presence.
By foogazi 2025-04-106:32 > completely different to if basic income was actually universal and expected to continue in the long-term
If we were in a “long term UBI situation” how would people really trust that the cash would keep flowing?
If current benefit programs (Medicare, social security, ACA, food stamps) are under attack how would it work with UBI ?
It would be fine for older workers to step back, but what about young adults coming into the workforce - would they just skip learning?
By oulipo 2025-04-0920:03 Perhaps, but they have actual arguments for their claim, and you have just hypotheses. Scientific studies like those are the best approximation we can have to a full rollout. So perhaps results won't be exactly the same with a full rollout, but at least they have already taken out the "people will just behave nonsensically / be worse off" hypotheses
By 1024core 2025-04-0923:21 If they really wanted to answer the question, they'd have to gather several millions of dollars, and then go to some island somewhere and provide UBI to everyone (without publicizing it, if at all possible). Then observe the changes in that group of people. For best results, choose an island in a developed part of the world.
By api 2025-04-100:50 One of my concerns about UBI is that it would just cause inflation to raise prices precisely high enough to cancel the effect of UBI.
You see this on a more limited scale when we do other things that subsidize demand. Give people assistance with home buying? House prices go up. Make college loans cheap and easy to get? Tuition costs go crazy.
By potato3732842 2025-04-0921:501 reply > but the psychology is completely different to if basic income was actually universal and expected to continue in the long-term.
Would it though? Do people really trust their governments that much?
Poor people who this would be most applicable to tend to deal with the government a lot more than UBI proponents so their trust levels are probably different.
> Do people really trust their governments that much?
In Europe? Yeah. Safety nets are not suddenly taken away.
By potato3732842 2025-04-0922:471 reply Social security wasn't taken away and probably never will be. How's it doing? What's it's 30yr outlook? You don't need to just trust that the program will exist, but that it will be useful on a timeline long enough that you can eschew investing in skills that make money. How many greeks do you think would trust their government to do that? What about the brits?
But of course policy minutia that can make or break programs are unimportant compared to cheap internet comments.
>> Social security wasn't taken away and probably never will be.
In the US, the "trick" is usually just to extend the age at which you get social security. Life expectancy is not universally equal, they vary widely based on gender, race, economics. For some subsets of our population Social security has essentially be eliminated for half the cohort because it starts past the average life expectancy.
(to be clear, I think this is atrocious)
By grafmax 2025-04-0922:37 The money supply argument seems flawed to me. As long as poorer people gain a larger share of the money supply, their increased spending power would outpace inflation. That’s because inflation is a function of the money supply in total, not the money supply of those with lower income.
By simonsarris 2025-04-100:14 Even a lifetime study would take an even longer time to cover the effects of children of people who never worked.
We do have some data on that, because of SSI (not to be confused with SSDI), results not great. It may be a selection effect, of course.
> the likely feedback effects on the broader economy that a universal rollout would have
It's interesting to describe as "likely" something for which there is no evidence. This is an actively anti-science belief. It seems to me as if you really don't like the idea of UBI and so are saying that, if it actually happened, the effect would be the opposite of what experimental data shows. This is pretty clearly biased.
> (increase in the money supply)
There is no effect on money supply if this is funded through taxes.
> Some things just can't be tested ahead of time empirically.
You can gradually expand the pool of people receiving UBI to see how these effects scale. Begin in one city, then increase to a larger region, then do it nationally.
> There is no effect on money supply if this is funded through taxes
Of course there is. Suppose we tax Elon several billion dollars. Now, instead of sitting in his money vault, it flows into the economy where it increases demand pressure.
By James_K 2025-04-0920:29 He doesn't have a money vault. He has almost zero cash holdings. If you tax him, then he will have to sell assets to pay for those taxes, which removes money from the economy as that money was being actively spent on his assets. The only situation when money supply changes is if someone has a literal mattress full of cash hidden away. Even if you just have money in a savings account, it acts as a fractional reserve for the banking system meaning that there is a net decrease in money supply when you give it to the government as banks can no longer use it as the backing for loans.
By HPsquared 2025-04-1213:51 To split hairs slightly that is the "velocity of money" (basically how often does the average dollar get spent and passed around per year). Money supply is the total amount of (a given type of) money in existence. But yeah, the effect on inflation is the same.
By mathgradthrow 2025-04-0921:221 reply The cost of an annuity that pays your basic, fundamental living expenses: Food, shelter, water, etc. can be thought of as a debt that all people are born with. In the US, you can obtain a room in an apartment, basic food, internet access, and transportation (minimal versions of all of these), for something like $15,000/year.
such a lifetime annuity would cost the average 18 year old on the order of 200-300 thousand dollars. This means that an 18 year old starts with about the same level of implicit debt, that a doctor who has just finished medical school has explicit debt, except that student debt doesn't scale with inflation.
A key feature of a society which values social mobility is reducing the debt burden of its children. I don't think the answer on basic income is cut and dry, and I do think its important for people to sustain themselves via their own efforts, but since you likely wouldn't increase the debt burden of a teenager, and you also didn't select the debt burden of the average teenager. You should at least consider the possibility that you would actually choose to reduce, by some amount, the debt burden of the average teenager.
Not that it’s the point of what you’re saying, but at 300k, a 15k yearly payout would be 5%. I'm almost certain that no-one would ever give a 5% inflation adjusted annuity to an 18 year old for 300k.
All that to say that the value you propose is probably even higher than what you lay out.
By mathgradthrow 2025-04-0921:481 reply I just got a quote for 16k/year for an 18 year old for 300k, so I think I did a pretty good job with my estimate actually :P.
By wave_function 2025-04-0921:541 reply Does that 16K/Year adjust for inflation?
By mathgradthrow 2025-04-0922:57 no, I was just the tiniest bit salty for being called out on extremely back of the envelope calculations that turned out damned close.
UBI is great on an individual level, but as we saw with the Covid Stimulus payments in the US, they cannot help but be quite inflationary. That's my biggest worry about injecting huge amounts of money into a system that is truly universal.
And if it's not truly universal, then it's a bad idea. Means tested money is just an incentive to fit the criteria.
Yes, the problem is you have more money chasing that same quantity of goods and thus you get inflation.
IMO a better way to achieve the UBI goal is to instead focus on universal basic goods. We're already nearly there with staple foods. For example bulk rice is now so cheap it's basically free. We could do the same with housing via prefab high density similar to Japan (mostly not done because it is illegal in the US). Internet and water is also near zero cost.
You would achieve the goals of UBI good-by-good without the inflation.
Sure, a true safety net. The "worst case scenario" would be that you're eating government rice and beans, living in a dorm, safe and able to get the basics including internet so you can get back on your feet. This type of thing shouldn't even be means tested. If you want to just live in such a place, then ok. Everything beyond that is what people can strive for, but you can always count on it.
I don't know enough about the reality of it, but I want to say the Nordic nations have something like this in place? I had a friend in Copenhagen who fell out the bottom of society due to an addiction and he was placed in an apartment, given support, and got back on his feet. That's what we should be aiming for in the US. People end up costing us a lot more money when they have zero help.
By HideousKojima 2025-04-100:351 reply >If you want to just live in such a place, then ok.
Even if you're the sort of person who will light your dorm on fire? Or stuff clothes into the toilet and flood the whole building? Or turn their dorm into a smelly orgy of sex and meth? Not even prisons have found perfect solutions to preventing issues like these, making everything out of concrete and metal helps but they still have guards 24/7 to step in when a prisoner acts up.
The visibly homeless are generally people with severe mental illness and/or hard drug addiction, and they are the ones most likely to destroy such places. This is to the detriment of the sorts of homeless that are just temporarily down on their luck and need help getting back on their feet who could actually make good use of such a thing.
By bentt 2025-04-101:22 Sure, my post was not expansive enough to account for criminals and the mentally ill. The bottom I referred to is for people without means, but with capacity to care for themselves.
The hard part of that conversation is that we consider criminal offenses as the only grounds for forcibly incarcerating a person. Mentally ill people need policies that will better protect them fron themselves and their neighbors BEFORE they commit crimes and end up in prison. We likely need new models of mental institutions and new laws which allow people to be committed when it is in everyone’s best interest… yet somehow avoid the abuses and horrors of the past. A very hard problem indeed.
