The other day I was thinking about the proposed UBI program in the states ($1000/month), and wondered what a difference it would make for the poorest people in the world if the same monthly budget was instead divided between all citizens of the world.

It ends up being about than $40 a month, but for people living under a dollar a day, that's a huge difference.

Unfortunately there is no financial structure in place yet to deliver UBI to every citizen of the world, but it's definitely something worth thinking about.

Enforcement is going to be pretty hard. It's the thing that Bill Gates talks about when talking about philanthropy.

If everyone in the world gets $30 - warlords in Africa, and landlords or local gangsters in other impoverished nations with weak law enforcement will easily be able to extract $25/person from their locality as 'protection money'.

Now though, if those thugs at the top end up spending that money on local businesses, they're slowly boosting their economy. But they're more likely to buy smuggled German cars, thus evading local import taxes and funneling that money back into the developed nations with zero gain for the local economy.

However, what I've stated is the worst case scenario. More likely than not, that $5 left with individuals is quite a lot in most countries and may end up boosting their economy albeit at a lower scale than what was imagined.

A lot of things need to change. Better transparent and accountable governance. Reliable and fair police/courts. Technology that can self sustain the population. (None of that patented seeds for farming).

Some level of sustainable land distribution (otherwise land lords suck all that UBI money anyway)

One could say SF is on average quite wealthy, but very broken. Even a UBI of $1000/month doesn’t do jack shit there until you solve the housing problem.

Basically people need to have good nutrition, have a roof over their head (feel secure), be autonomous and have some sort of self worth (mostly comes from doing some sort of work that creates value). All without destroying the planet (which we’re doing at an accelerated pace)

UBI doesn’t necessarily guarantee all those conditions are met.

GiveDirectly is experimenting with that kind of small-sum UBI in eastern Africa: https://www.givedirectly.org/

It would require a world government with teeth to be able to pull that off, Einstein was a famous proponent of this but even he could not make the case convincingly enough to get people to give it a try.

https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/should-we-have-a-world-gove...

I'm no economist, but injecting that much money that fast into an economy opens a whole new can of worms with inflation and currency devaluation right?

Yes, but the net value is increased. It’s because giving $20 to a homeless person has a different effect than giving $20 to Jeff Bezos. The homeless person goes and spends it immediately, whereas Jeff Bezos’ spending habits won’t meaningfully change because of that.

>unless you got other countries to pay for it.

Well it is Universal Basic Income, not National Basic Income. One of the fun discussions with UBI is seeing people discuss who should and shouldn't get it.

All UBI experiments that I'm aware of so far have been confined to a single country.

All the ones I recall are extremely limited on a number of fronts. They limited to a small group of people, for a limited time, and generally the funds are quite limited. I personally don't think these even qualify as UBI because some of the proposed positives for UBI do not exist when it has such limits. For example, if you are only getting UBI for 2 years, you have to plan out for the rest of your life after those 2 years and can't make the same choices as if you were being given UBI for life.

Fully agreed. UBI simply has not yet been tried on a scale and over a span of time that it would qualify as a real trial.

Of course other countries should pay for it.

There is a conflict of interest. Foreign aid won't work because you're effectively paying corrupt politicians to keep their country unstable so that they can collect more foreign aid.

Foreign aid doesn't have to be given to local politicians for them to distribute as they see fit. You can also pay trusted outsiders to do it instead. And the magnitude of repeat payments should probably depend on how much the previous installments helped instead of how bad the situation still is.