People who are able to focus on their work because they can pay their bills, have good working conditions, are healthy and able to care for their families work better. Big surprise.

Of course there's an upper limit to this - if you're paying your apple pickers more than the retail price of the apples then you're going to be in trouble. But in those cases, the price of apples needs to be higher so that apple pickers can have some basic human dignity. Apples should cost more, but we have created an evil system that destroys apple pickers' lives so that the rest of us can have cheap apples. Let's not do that any more.

You can see this in the current economy as restaurants and packaged foods suppliers in some sectors reduce the size of portions.

All of those become more and more true (and are already true for a large class of products) as mechanization and automation increases.

You can't just say, well, just reduce the amount fo labour to keep costs down. That labour still needs to be employed doing something.

it is in fact disproportionate, raising wages raising productivity by a greater amount.

Given the evidence, do you now believe this to be true?

Source?

>Apples should cost more, but we have created an evil system that destroys apple pickers' lives so that the rest of us can have cheap apples. Let's not do that any more.

What if raising the price of apples lowers demand, causing less jobs to he available? Presumably apple picking is the best job those workers can get, so the likely consequence is that they'll be unemployed and we'll have to substitute 100% of their income (rather than 50% or whatever if they were picking apples). That seems like a poor allocation of labor/resources.

There's this set of objections to UBI based around "yes, ok, it works in the small scale, but it'll never work on a large scale".

If we did a large scale experiment, and it confirms that it works, the objections will move to "sure, OK, but it'll never work on a national level".

So let's just implement it and see if it works. If it doesn't work, we can always just go back to letting people starve.

They really, really don't. All the experiments on a small scale show is the trivial conclusion that if you give people some central government funds for a year or two, they tend to be slightly less poor at the end. None of them come remotely close to suggesting that people are so much more productive that they can cover the costs of UBI to people already out of the labour force by choice, never mind those that may choose to exit it in future.

Elderly people already get a UBI in the form of Social Security, and that's politically impossible to cut regardless of whether it's a good or bad idea.

Once you turn it on and people get used to it, you can never turn it off in a democracy.

Only if the country still has the ability to change and the economy isn't permanently damaged.

Small-scale experiments have been quite successful though.

And are absolutely useless to study the very important effects that these kinds of systems have on a nation's economy.

I've looked to history for examples of actual real world attempts to guarantee some minimum quality of life for all citizens of a particular group. They consistently do well for some self selected and committed initial group and then go badly when the doors get flung open to include everyone.

One result I recall hearing about is instituting policies like "You don't work, you don't eat" in order to prevent freeloaders from utterly killing the whole system and taking everyone down with them.

Tale as old as time:

> For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule:“The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Thessalonia...

>No large scale experiment exists for UBI.

Non sequitur.

So I don't think we need worry about everyone stopping working. What we need to consider is the marginal effect of the small population that does. If the unemployment rates doubles, what impact would that have on the economy? There is a lot to figure out with a problem like that, but it is a different caliber of problem from total economic meltdown.

Right now we have a trickle-down economy which caters primarily to the needs of institutions and big capital holders. This is why our society is so politically charged and divided and why we have such fast growing inequality.

We're already essentially giving institutions and capital holders free money through capital appreciation. We need to give some free money to those at the bottom too or else it's not fair and it will lead to a revolution sooner or later.

What does tend to happen when a system is put in place to provide support for those who refuses to accept any employment, is that the ability for wealth hoarders to use their hoards as a lever go gain more wealth and power declines as the bargaining power gets more even.

One of the benefits of universal(non-means-tested) welfare project is that the graft and administration overhead of those systems tend to be much lower then "charity" based welfare projects and UBI is the ultimate in low overhead universal welfare. And when you look at the structure of most post-industrial economies admin overhead and graft is more then 50% of the economy, i.e. it's by no means a given that we cannot keep up production of goods and services with even 60% of the population of UBI.

You rightly point out that that does not apply to supply-inflexible goods like housing in cities.

Artificial scarcity is created by producing machines that intentionally break, bunkering and throwing away stuff, patent trolling and so on.

UBI alone likely won’t fix this though.

“UBI” isn’t actually a specific plan, its a broad concept within which there are many specific plans. But the broad concept itself does address this, though many of the more detailed plans do so in…more detail.

At a high level, one of the central points of UBI as a replacement for traditional means-tested welfare (and why some of its earliest advocates were right-libertarians, not lefties, such as Milton Friedman who advocated “negative income tax” which is identical to a UBI) is that it eliminates the disincentives to earning outside income that come with the sharp (sometimes greater than 1:1 when aggregated across all benefit programs a person qualifies for) funding reductions for outside income that come with means tested benefit programs, increasing the marginal reward (and thus incentive) to work.

> Rich people still eat the same amount of food for dinner.

No, they generally don’t. Oh, sure, that might be true by mass, or even by calories; but not by labor-hours of work that went into it, or dollar cost, which is what is relevant here. And that’s true across all categories of consumption.

Some consider those distinct as they state the UBI would not decrease with additional earned income.

They are the same; both have the effect that benefits are “drawn down” through marginal taxation of outside income, though Friedman’s specific NIT proposal had an exceptionally high (though still lower than the effective drawdown rates often faced by means-tested benefit recipients) marginal rate (50%) for the the below-break-even bracket (essentially, the bracket whose outside income was less than “Effective UBI”/(bottom tax rate)), which most UBI proponents would reject in favor of consistently progressive rates. But this isn’t an inherent feature of generalized negative income tax.

An alternative is to greatly increase temporary work visas, and make those immigrants exempt from getting UBI as a clause in their immigration visa. Of course this might lead to other issues.

However, UBI funded by taxes on bad behavior can still work but it would not act as a replacement for unemployment benefits.

They get to live and work legally in the US and get a salary paid in US dollars. That seems to worth a lot to a lot of people. You are of course right about the very obvious two class system it will create and the long term social consequences of such a system are tricky to predict.

Edit: The US birthright citizenship rules might actually make this harder to implement.

If this is so good why the need for a UBI for citizens in the first place?