> I find that most of the arguments put forth in favor of UBI seem relatively narcissistic in nature (Your startup fails and you end up on the street? Yeah, not my problem actually, nor would it be my problem if you spent your entire paycheck on losing powerball tickets etc).

I look at this from a different angle: right now, startups skew heavily towards founders with significant risk-tolerance (young, healthy, good educations, family money, business connections, often partnered with someone who also has high-income career options, etc.) for whom the worst-case outcome is probably something like taking a job at BoringCorp and hanging out in cube-ville until they build up their reserves.

There's nothing wrong with that but there's an argument that society is missing out on a lot of ideas which won't grow out of that fairly homogenous subculture. If we provide a basic cushion, it makes it less intimidating for someone from a less comfortable background to take a chance. That could be particularly beneficial to society: someone coming up with some business ideas which are viable in, say, a factory town or agriculture has the potential to affect a lot of people who are largely ignored by Silicon Valley culture.

I've been ahead of the curve a couple times and I've crashed and burned because of it only to see someone else do essentially the same thing 5 or so years later and knock it out of the park. That's bad luck and bad timing IMO not some social injustice. Anyone with talent these days can soft land into BoringCorp IMO. We're not exactly swimming in talent.

I'm not far from taking another swing these days and I think the time I've taken to develop financial cushioning has also let me develop better skills to analyze both the nature and the timing of the sort of businesses I wish to pursue.

And if you have kids, that's your startup, take 'em to IPO. They're worth far more than $$$.

>Your startup fails and you end up on the street? Yeah, not my problem

It kind of is though. The cost of making failure painful is all the potential innovators who decide to get a safe job instead.

Utterly false dichotomy. You can innovate from a safe job(tm) as well (not that any job is safe in an age of at-will employment). The difference is that in exchange for a lower payout for success, one gets a much higher payout for failure, a sort of UBI if you will.

Sure, you can innovate in a safe job. And then your employer likely owns it. Good for them!

That's not a criticism of corporations, just pointing out that taking a risk and striking out on your own isn't necessarily a reckless decision.

Yes, they own it, in exchange for protecting you from the 90% chance of failure (perhaps you should save your best ideas for when you've acquired enough resources to build it on your own? I don't, ideas are cheap, it's the executions on those ideas that has built value for me).

And I don't think startups are reckless, but I think a lot of the people that join them fail to do rudimentary financial calculations as to whether doing so has a better expected return than a safe(tm) job.

Otherwise, they wouldn't accept chicken scratchings worth of lottery tickets and 20-50% lower compensation. But yet they do, over and over, no matter how many people lay it out how bad an idea this usually is.

https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/dont-waste-y...

How noble of those large corporations to save you from yourself!

So, basically, your point is that you should sneakily hide your best ideas from your employers and then strike out on your own when you hit that magical amazing idea! You know, that idea that is obviously going to be an amazing success and you can know that ahead of time! People that foolishly try to succeed on their own time are rubes! Instead of accepting a check from the government, you should mail it in with a job you're entirely checked out of until you find the magical secret sauce to make yourself a billionaire. That's great for everyone right?

>You can innovate from a safe job(tm) as well

To some extent, but big companies are likely to be much more conservative towards new ideas. If they weren't, there would be little benefit to being an entrepreneur.

Another bogus assertion: Big companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple etc. are constantly iterating on innovation. Most of that innovation never sees the light of day just like most startups are destined for failure.

IMO the benefit to being an entrepreneur is that if you truly have a winning idea, you can own a lot more of its fruits by pursuing it from your own business. For it requires nearly the same skillset to procure VC as it does to persuade a large company to let you build something. Risk is and should be proportional to return.

To that end, I have nearly 20 patents filed from within large companies, most of them single inventor. And my salary amortized over a 4-year startup life cycle is on par with what I would have gotten as a non 3-letter title at an acquired startup that wasn't a Google or a Facebook.

So why take a chance on failure without the chance of a big payout? And except for the 3-letter titles, that's what a lot of newbies unknowingly sign up to do, risk >>>> return. I have no desire to socialize this learning experience for them.

This goes both ways. The cost of making failure painless is that people don't try as hard to avoid it. If the relative difference in utility between success and failure goes down, the incentive to achieve that difference goes down.