> Actually 5.3M adults have RSA in France(pop 66M) [...] Yes, the bureaucracy is daunting... [...] I'm just saying it looks a lot like UBI and doesn't lead to prosperity nor happiness.

If it involves daunting bureaucracy, and how much you get depends on how little other income you have, such that only the less than 10% at the bottom of the income distribution qualify, it doesn't look a lot (or even at all) like a UBI.

RSA is a minimum income -- a kind of means-tested benefit of the type UBI is offered as an alternative to -- not something that looks at all like a UBI. The difference is that RSA has a 1:1 loss of benefits with additional income up to the RSA threshold (at which point the benefit is zero.)

UBI has no loss of benefits with additional income, which means that -- unlike a RSA-like minimum income -- additional income for someone earning less than the UBI benefit amount provides additional utility, while with a minimum income it does not. This is one of the problems with incentive and ability to improve one's own condition that is inherent to means-tested social benefit programs (and also a driver of bureaucracy in such programs) that UBI aims to address.

That statistic by itself is a little meaningless, is'n it?

For instance, I could say:

" In 2013, child poverty reached record high levels in the U.S., with 16.7 million children living in food insecure households. Many of the neighborhoods these children live in lack basic produce and nutritious food. 47 million Americans depend on food banks, more than 30% above 2007 levels." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States)

That doesn't sounds like prosperity or happiness..

I wrote this in reaction to "RSA is extremely limited": almost 10% of a population is not "extremely limited".

And I didn't say these statistics say anything about prosperity or happiness, but look higher in the thread: France has all sorts of UBI-like social benefits, and it doesn't bring happiness nor prosperity (that's what I wrote).

The point of social programs it's, normally, that all the citizens of a country, where there are huge material richness, enjoy a minimum of quality of life. If we accept that this is the goal, then, we have to accept the program is pretty successful.

It seems to me that if you want to talk about happiness or prosperity, you have to compare it to other ways of organizing society (other countries), in other case, it's meaningless.

Saying "France isn't so bad, so it's working" doesn't cut it for me.

Actually France is the "other way of organizing society" (having something that looks a lot like Basic Income, see higher in the thread), and most other countries are "the baseline"... In this context, we observe no clear benefits (high unemployment, almost no growth).

Last time I checked (2 years ago), they were spending 12000€ annually for each and every homeless in France, which is great... Except they are still homeless, when this amount is similar to minimum wage (enough to NOT be homeless, and that's without social benefits). This money was basically wasted and didn't fix any problem.

So the point of heavy social programs is: people aren't happier, and in the end feel entitled to benefits... even when it downs the economy and employment.

The 5.3M number is not adults receiving RSA, just some number the newspaper made of thin air as an estimate of the total people who may be benefiting from RSA.

The actual number is 2.53M families receiving RSA, with no soecific details on how many people by family (from the agency POV, the number of people actually doesn't matter much. They are taxed as an entity and receive RSA under the same conditions)