India does have something akin to basic income for rural households.

Fair, it's not just free money but it is a guarantee of at least 100 days of work a year.

https://www.uclg-cisdp.org/en/observatory/mahatma-gandhi-nat...

The government is only able to provide a total of around 54 crore person days of employment through this scheme. That is less than half crore people in a country of 130 crore people availing this "guarantee" of at least 100 days of work a year.

https://www.nrega.nic.in/netnrega/mgnrega_new/Nrega_StateRep...

I think there's something like an inverse relationship between how many jobs are available and how much people need support. The US is actually among the top manufacturers still, but very little of it is still done by humans, so it doesn't create enough jobs. Even the jobs that remain for most people (retail/service) will eventually be automated away. There is plenty of money for UBI if the people who've benefited pay their fair share back into the systems that enabled those lopsided gains.

Some kind of support is needed in this case because none of the gains from all that efficiency are going to people who need money just to survive. It's probably not as important in places where it's still cheaper to hire humans than it is to install a robot in most cases.

Please spend some time in a city in a third world country. I can't imagine a better way to cure for that level of inaccuracy of worldview.

I suggest Kolkata. The sight of frail old ladies barely covered by a single tattered sheet of cloth living on the footpath and begging for your alms has a way of communicating the reality of the world that nothing I can write could ever possibly match.

I can't possibly afford the trip, so I'll have to take your word for it.

The minimum wage in the USA is $7 an hour. In India, 10% of people live below $2 a day. In the state where I come from (population >100 million), that number is over 33%.

Even if you find yourself less fortunate compared to other people in your country, please have some empathy for the scale of problems in other, less developed countries.

You're reading too much into what I said. Nothing in it suggests a lack of empathy. I made no qualitative statements beyond the bit about rich people needing to pay back into the system that made their wealth possible. There is absolutely no judgement of any people in developing countries.

> It's probably not as important in places where it's still cheaper to hire humans than it is to install a robot in most cases.

Can you clarify what you meant by this? To me it seemed that you are implying that somehow the poor in third world countries are better off than the poor in first world countries because they still have their 2$ a day jobs.

Nope. Not saying anything of the sort. Your read is qualitative.

My comment was quantitative, strongly implied by the math. If I were going to make a qualitative statement, I would say life sucks for almost everyone on this godawful planet in different ways. You're trying to parse out a judgement of those relative conditions in me saying UBI might not be a universal solution to the hell-sphere theory of life on Earth. I don't know why.

Like I said, my objection was based on the way you had phrased that last sentence in your comment.

> It's probably not as important in places where it's still cheaper to hire humans than it is to install a robot in most cases.

The reason universal basic income does not work in India is not because people here still have their $3/day jobs. It doesn't work because there is simply not enough wealth here to restribute, so the problem here is still one of creation of wealth.

Maybe basic income only applies to "first world countries". Maybe there is a notion of plenty that only applies to modern industrial societies with high resource/population ratios. Maybe India just isnt ready?

Of course that is what I believe. Should have been clear from the way I phrased the question.

There was nothing in the context that suggested that this this discussion was only about the poor in developed countries. After all, most of the world's poor actually live (unsurprisingly) in poor to low-medium income countries. Perhaps this is something that I should be mindful of in the future?

As someone born in a "third world country" I am obviously very interested personally in these problems. In the state I was born in, one out of three people is still below the poverty line (which is like 2 USD a day). To me it seems that for us it is much more practical to learn from whatever the fuck China is doing rather than a method whose primary appeal is ideological.