Perhaps. That helps determine if older people who don't make a lot of money anyway will just decide to stop working.
However, perhaps the bigger question is if it's offered to younger people, will a lot of them simply never get a job after school and, by the time they realize they need more than UBI, it's too late.
Obviously a large part of that is the boom in tech so I don’t know how reasonably those people could have become doctors or air traffic controllers with their famously long start up time and forced retirement ages respectively.
The more interesting cohort for me would be 25-35 year olds (with special emphasis on females) wondering if it would be enough to convince large swathes of new parents not in professional track careers to exit the workforce and care for their own children instead of using daycare. This would be a real net positive for society if it occurred in my opinion.
I don't necessarily disagree with your other point although I doubt $10K a year or whatever would be enough to influence these sorts of decisions for most people. Any UBI is going to be very Basic.
I'm not a 30 year old restarting my career but I restarted my programming career at 27 after pausing it for military service. A couple of notes:
- I have not met very many people in tech that have lateral moved careers. I mainly sight them online.
- This path was not easy and I would 100% not recommend it, especially if you cannot handle years on years of failure and insecurity in your face.
- I would call tech a young person's game. Company behaviors, attitudes, and hiring practices reward youth and the energy that goes with it.
Those considerations in mind, counting on rolling the dice on tech is not a good idea. For every one of these people you meet, I suspect there's a long line of people who didn't make it or couldn't tolerate the journey, and I don't blame them.
The introduction of UBI divides society into the "pleasantry", who live modestly on the UBI, and the "workers" who aspire to a higher standard of living, study to get qualifications, and then work. Take home pay has to be high to get people to work at all, taxes have to be high to fund the UBI, therefore gross pay has to be very high. Let us assume major advances in automation, so that the sums work out.
In the next generation there is a class divide. Children of workers get brought up with a set of expectations about studying in school, getting qualifications, and working twenty hours a week at a very highly paid job (perhaps repairing broken down automated systems - endless one-off jobs that are ill suited to modern statistical artificial intelligence). Children of the pleasantry grow up with a different set of expectations around being thrifty and enjoying simple pleasures (simple is perhaps a euphemism for cheap, but there is also an aspect of living a gently paced life that passes copious spare time enjoyably).
I anticipate a two-way flow. Some of the children of the workers struggle academically and see no prospect of ever learning to trouble shoot a broken down robot. They give up and grow up to be members of the pleasantry. Other children of the workers just think that the pleasantry have the better deal and drop out of the working class. Meanwhile there is traffic the other way, as children of the pleasantry query why other children have expensive toys. The adult world is explained to them: the children with expensive toys are the children of workers. And so some children of the pleasantry learn to aspire to more, to study, work, and have luxuries.
The key issue is the numbers. If 50% of the children of the workers join the pleasantry and 10% of the children of the pleasantry join the workers, then the working class will shrink and the pleasantry grow.
For example, maybe the first generation sees an even split, 50% workers, 50% pleasantry. The proportion of workers falls to 30%, then 22% then 19%,..., solving for the equilibrium, we only have 17% workers, even though the 20 year trial had the proportion of workers holding up reasonably well, above 30%.
My belief is that we will forced much earlier to start real UBI program, thanks to the push of automation. I forecast real nation-wide UBI being implemented in a country before 2045. I would bet on a Nord European country.
Imagine if Boston suddenly announced UBI for all residents. People are going to be toppling over each other to get into that city somehow for the free money.
So we move some people off the existing schemes we have, onto UBI and let that study run. I suspect the ideal candidate group would be older, poorer people (say, in there 40s) who we would otherwise expect to coast onto a pension later. It timeframes it nicely, and if it works starts making the case for trying it with younger cohorts.