UBI will never pay what a government job pays in purchasing power; that part is just math I think.

I don't think that is unreasonable to expect that government pay in a world where the government is a welfare program with a governing hobby might have less purchasing power than UBI in a world where we prioritize effective governance over beaurocracy. It's not a zero sum game.

There are just under 3 M federal (civilian) employees. I think it's entirely unreasonable to think that we would pay a UBI to ~210 M adult citizens (a 70x multiple) at levels that would represent a greater amount of purchasing power than to the people nominally working for the federal government.

If you're firm in your view that that's reasonable, I'd like to learn more about the proposal as to how the math would work.

OK. I'm not going to code up a simulation because the research hasn't been done to confirm my choice of constants, but I can sketch it. Given a macroeconomic climate and and a set of cultural norms, most of our workdays are can be described as a blend of:

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The Missionary - has a mission and is working towards it. Care's more about the mission than prestige.

The Worker - doesn't have a plan, but likes to be a part of something meaningful. Will gamble with prestige in order to ensure that the work stays meaningful.

The Bureaucrat - willing to tolerate or create waste in favor of preserving prestige. Sometimes manages to trick a worker into believing they're a missionary.

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Obviously people are more complex than this. Also, I'll use dollars to indicate productive output even though I think that most of the time collapsing such things to a single dimension is a slippery slope to somewhere awful. All this to say: gimme a break, it's model.

Here are my totally made up constants, note that X is a parameter which will depend on UBI:

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Missionary creates 100$ of output always, plus a 1% daily chance to inspire a worker to become a missionary, a 1% chance to inspire a bureaucrat to become a worker, and a 1% chance to burn out and become a worker.

Worker creates 80$ of output if they're following a missionary and -20$ if they're following a bureaucrat because it's likely that they're causing more harm than good. They have an X% chance of burning out and becoming a bureaucrat.

A Bureaucrat creates -$20 of output, because they're definitely doing more harm than good.

Now lets say that everybody consumes $5 each day to stay alive.

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So X is our worker burn-out rate.

As with most systems of this kind, it's very sensitive to initial conditions. If you start with a high enough concentration of workers and missionaries, your bureaucrat rate will be very low and you'll have a surplus. Too many bureaucrats and most of your workers are doing more harm than good, the system is carried (if it survives at all) by the missionaries and the minority of workers following them.

Critically, X is a function of risk tolerance. The worker becomes a bureaucrat because they're afraid that their family will starve. That is, they cannot tolerate the risk of pointing out the wastefulness of their bureaucrat.

Introducing UBI does two things. It makes standing up to your Bureaucrat less risky, reducing X, and it creates a fourth type, the Video Gamer, who consumes $5 to stay alive but doesn't sabotage the output of any workers like the bureaucrat does.

Some percentage of the Bureaucrats will become Video Gamers if UBI is implemented. That percent depends on the size of the surplus. If the surplus gets big enough, UBI can be so comfortable that there's no reason to be a bureaucrat, because it doesn't afford a significant quality of life increase.

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So to answer your question about the 3M and the 210M, I'd guess that today we've got 213M people living on the positive output of maybe 50M--the rest are bureaucrats or are following bureaucrats. They're busy fighting over their slice of the pie instead of baking it. Bureaucrats sort of expand to consume available resources, so as automation improves worker output, that ratio will get worse unless we find a place to put them.

We'd have to do research to come up with better constants and run that model for real to be sure, but I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that reducing the bureaucrat rate by 50% would triple the system's output--once you let it equilibriate. I'm not sure how much more federal employees will get paid above UBI, but I think there's room for the end result to be that future UBI is cushier than today's government work.

Where does the UBI money come from in this system, particularly if the surplus gets so bit that there's no reason to take a government job?

We issue it to ourselves, more or less like CirclesUBI is doing it in Berlin.

They're just letting it be inflationary and setting the payout to increase over time to adjust for inflation. So maybe you get $5 per week this year and $8 per week next year... This can be balanced so that it amounts to a more or less constant purchasing power.

Personally I prefer the demurrage approach where account balances just have a decay rate--that way you've got a better shot at $5 written down today having the same meaning to people who read it next year, but the economics are the same.

It's gotta be decoupled from the government so that, as discussed in my model, it can act as a safety net while you're ridding yourself of wasteful bureaucracy. It doesn't exactly work if the bureaucrat can threaten to take away your UBI.

The people who need a pyramid structure to strive for, and office politics to fight, will never settle for "from each according to their ability and to each according to their need", and those are the people we've selected for.

So we give them a pyramid to fight over. We should just stop letting it be the whole world.