If the idea is to give everybody money so that you can tax it more, you're engaging in economic waste. Without being able to increase productivity in other areas to cover the lost value, you will, hopefully slowly, but eventually trend towards zero, and a failure of the system overall.
Encouraging economic productivity in an environment in which nobody has to be productive may or may not be possible, I honestly haven't any idea, but its certainty doesn't seem terribly obvious to me.
A basic income doesn't remove the potential for poverty.
Sorry, but the whole idea is laughable. Not to mention the fact that it's another incentive to have more children and bigger families because the state will give you more money.
Should be easy to back that wild claim up with statistics. Can you?
Everywhere I look, I see the opposite. Families with a comfortable amount of disposable income have the 2.4 kids, but those in poverty (and particularly the working poor) have 3, or upwards. Anecdotal, but I'm yet to see evidence to the contrary
I always suspected that the reality was more like "people who are able to afford children and able to make long-term plans tend to have only as many children as they want, when they feel they are ready, but people who aren't able to afford children or who don't make long-term plans will tend to take a more devil-may-care attitude towards procreation."
Since population explosion has felt out of fashion, there's a long time that I didn't see such plot. But what I've seen has a much clearer tendency than most social correlations people use at real decisions. It's about as clear as most correlations of quality of life with GDP.
If you try and slice it by family you find that the 'traditional' family makes up a fairly small percentage of the population.
Richer men in the same country have more kids.
PS: I think I just misread your comment. By "national scale" I thought you meant in the same country.
I don't know of any study on national level, i.e. of families in a single country. The only thing I know of are anecdotes and stories about very poor families having 5+ children.
EX: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/kids_are_normal....
Higher income > more kids, Higher education > fewer children.
This seems fairly obvious as people are less likely to have children and stay in school. But, as I understand it the effect is larger than that.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/richer-people-w...
http://freakonomics.com/2011/06/10/the-rich-vs-poor-debate-a...
Basically if you have two groups of American born, collage educated men, with of the same age then income positively correlates with number of children. But, if you compare collage dropouts vs. people that have PHD's then the PHD population makes more money and has fewer kids. So, education is a huge confounding factor.
We went from 14 being a reasonable age to start a family to 24 or even 34 being the 'reasonable age' that's a huge impact. But, ‘wealth’ as an independent factor aka adjusted for age, education, country etc becomes a positive factor.
PS: Historically, starvation also limited family size.
A talk by Hans Rosling[1] on the subject.
But bear in mind: Statistics could indicate the extent that the incentive is having on the incentivized population group, if at all.
This could well be cost neutral for the UK.