The reason I say this is because a lot of people base who they are on what they do for a living and how well they do it. The feeling of being needed by other people is what gives a lot of people their sense of self-worth. IMO the biggest risk with a UBI program is that it will cause huge gaps in this equation as a lot of people realize they no longer have to work to feed and clothe themselves. So, when we finally come around to rolling out UBI nationally (I see it as simply inevitable), it needs to be accompanied by lots and lots of social programming that aims to decouple people's sense of self-worth from their perceived worth to society.

I envision a future where traditional introductions go from:

"My name is Bob, I'm from Cleveland, and I'm an electrician."

to:

"My name is Bob, I'm from Cleveland, and I spend my time tending to my garden and teaching the kids in the neighborhood how to grow plants."

One of the main problems with the existing social net is that it comes with "economic cliffs" where making a little more is not to your economic advantage. And then people who make the rational decision are seen as "lazy".

For a real example, my niece had to turn down a job because it paid her $0.20 too much to stay on food stamps. And she couldn't be paid less because it would have broken union rules. So she did the rational thing and turned down the better job. Which meant that her skills and education went underutilized.

One of the big arguments for UBI is that this kind of thing doesn't happen.

It shouldn't take far-seeing, risk taking, and great inconvenience to get out of poverty. If our society wants to bring people out of poverty, it should make the choices leading to that obvious, low risk, and convenient.

If the context was game development, this wouldn't even be an issue. People do what they're incentivized to do.

Also your conclusion about "rational decision" is clearly wrong. Taking risks is not necessarily rational. Doubly not when you are a single mother with 3 kids and a deadbeat ex.

Taking the job guaranteed losing her money. If she kept the job for a couple of years, she would have started to break even, but it would be quite a few years until she was ahead of where she was. Instead she continued to look for a job that either paid just little enough to keep food stamps, or offered a prospect of paying enough to offset losing food stamps.

Your reasoning is based on the theory that your best way up is to take the best job you can and then work your way up. That was how things worked when I was a kid. But today people tend to improve their job by switching jobs, not by being promoted in their current one. Therefore staying underpaid is often a better route up than switching to a job you don't want in the hope of maybe being promoted some day.

That being said I do agree that if there's a huge difference in future earning power, it would still generally worth it to go for the job that involves giving up food stamps.

If you can manage to hold your life together well enough to continue to do the job, with fewer resources available.

My personal experience with periods of time where I was under-employed, is that "Work = being part of society." People feel better when they know they are actively contributing. That's just a simple truth.

I am resolutely apolitical, but very much ADMIRE Trump's ability to state & capture - in a tweet - the underlying fears / motivations of voters.

And, to get completely off topic, there's a lovely article quantifying Trump's approach - based on the gunning-fog index - vs clinton / sanders.

(1) http://www.ibtimes.com/donald-trump-tweets-lower-reading-lev...

I find this interesting, because it's a great example of some of the values implicit in American society.

Note that the way you expressed it, essentially the only way to contribute to society is by working a job. I don't think it's a stretch to claim that that's a very narrow-minded way of looking at it.

In my opinion American society is really, really good at all things economic, but really, really bad at actually enjoying/finding value in the things that go on outside the office.

Note the way I expressed it, the emphasis is on contributing. Your particular spin strikes me as an eagerness to oppose a particular POV, then you go on to project that POV onto me. I don't thrive as well when contributing as a volunteer, which I did when under employed, as when I have a full time job. Keep in mind the efficient market hypothesis. Most of the jobs constituting valuable contributions are going to be paid. There are going to be exceptions, of course, but not all of those roles are going to be suitable for everybody.

Your analysis is fatally flawed from this point. Teachers are valuable, and I feel they should be full-on professionals paid like we pay coders. Farm Workers and Wait Staff could be valuable, depending on what level of skill, diligence, and expertise they bring. Those two categories cover a very broad range of levels of expertise.

Parents and caregivers didn't start out as a part of the economic system. They also don't necessarily have to be paid. It has been noted that paying people to do what they'd do for free often has well known pathologies associated with it.

This type of motivation is what leads impoverished South Americans to destroy the largest rainforest on Earth, or African children to work in gold mines exposed to toxic mercury, dragline fisherman to deplete great oceans full of life, the list is endless.

This only shows that our world has incentives that are sometimes way out of whack. It doesn't then follow that the answer is basic income. Other societies have tried "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" with following drops in productivity.

I think you might be able to get people on board to support the first justification. The second one is going to be a lot harder to sell.

Both justifications exists, along with an multitude more justifications.

This doesn't have much to do with Trump or gut-reactions. This has to do with some folks feeling entitled to the benefits created by hundreds of millions of people's effort because they were born in a certain place and time. Those benefits should be reserved for people who contribute to society.

The good thing is none of this will ever happen, as most people are good-hearted folks that want to contribute to society. A better discussion would be figuring out society can help facilitate that, instead of placating those who currently don't have a good way of contributing.

And at least 2 of those are only as high because of greed and deliberately exclusionary policies.

At least looking around at other adults, I've noticed many spend really, really appalling amounts of money on things that don't really improve their lives in any way - and furthermore, that they seem to do so solely because it's what their parents did, or what they think is appropriate in society. Moreover, most consider it essentially an ironclad mandate that they work a 40 hour week until they're too old to work any longer.

I think it's pretty clear that xenophobic resistance to Remain was whipped up by various politicians. Are the people that voted based on this bigots? Many of them, yes, but some are just exhibiting fear of "them" (taking jobs, etc).

For instance, children are definitely a part of the society, and a very important part, but they differ from grown-ups in many regards. For one thing, they are dependent on their parents / guardians.

Other people, even totally grown up, may be considered so dependent on e.g. the government that they are not even allowed to vote due to the conflict of interest. E.g. US troops were not allowed to vote for most of the US history.

Were UBI enacted, I'm sure people who choose to live entirely off it, and people who choose to work (and thus provide the means for the UBI, among other things), will inevitably be seen differently, and you can't help it. Consider it when thinking about equality, integration of the society, etc.

We already make similar prejudices now, for a number of reasons.

But I don't think it's true for people that didn't earn their money through work like those that inherited it or won the lottery. Society can be pretty dismissive of people in these categories.

I even think that we differentiate between people who are rich from work. Some people are seen has "having really earned it" while others "just got lucky." Shades of grey for sure, and people might disagree here but I think this is a real phenomenon that those who are seen as having done more valuable work are held in higher esteem.

Lots of people don't have productive passions. They were focused on being valuable to their family and community instead. What now for them?

Adaptation, classification, a change in how people define themselves?

You point out what I think would end up being a rough patch, but one worth going through.

More importantly, UBI doesn't prevent people who want jobs from getting jobs, so that seems a completely irrelevant thing to bring up anyway.

I get that UBI doesn't prevent people from getting jobs. I support it. It's just not a solution for people who's jobs have been automated away because lots of people were never looking for the freedom to accept a job that pays less the way UBI allows. It's like shortening Everest to improve mountain climbers' quality of life.