While I am a staunch advocate of UBI as a solution to a massive swath of present and emerging problems around the world, I also do not see the experiments around it leading to its mass adoption in at least the span of decades.
Things have to get much worse (and they will) and we will need some active social unrest (on the scale of Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter, except informed about UBI and fighting for it in a unified message) before the wealthy will acknowledge that if they want to stay wealthy, they need a society to be wealthy within, and we won't have one if people are destitute and starving by the millions because traditional capitalist expectations of work and compensation break down in the face of growing automation.
While I mostly agree, I'm not for UBI. It makes people dependent on centralised state even more. We need decentralisation to avoid dictate for masses that you described above.
UBI is just not happening any time soon in the US. To start, half of the country is already default against it. Precisely 0 people in Congress, the White House, or those in adjacent power roles (lobbyists and whatnot) are for it or have any idea what it is.
Aside from rolling out the guillotine, I don't see UBI a possibility until the 2nd half of the 21st century. There's just too many forces and entities alive that don't want it
Well, there needs to be an actor that has enough influence and power to actually make it all work. UBI isn't going to work if it's ultimately a volunteer based system. We already have lots of voluntary donations ($ and time) in our present day.
The idea of UBI, to me at least, is a mind-blowing one. It’s a shame something like this doesn’t exist on a large scale already. I know I’m probably missing something important here, but can someone outline any good reasons, if any, that it hasn’t been implemented yet?
UBI desperately needs to be tried out on a semi-large scale as a social experiment. We can't even form a useful moral argument about it until we know its effects. Will it start shaping local and regional policy or is it just going to quietly get discarded as a idea before its time?
People who want a job like that should just be on UBI instead. Then at least we'd have systems that could change to meet the needs of their users in a timely way.
UBI would never work. It ignores basics of how humans operate. We have it in some sense in France. The problems it tries to address are only amplified after UBI.
I've seen realistic figures for my country on UBI and from what I've seen UBI at a realistic level does not seem to be affordable. It's insanely expensive. Moreover, without massive changes elsewhere in society, UBI would decrease social mobility and lead to a two-class society that keeps the poor even poorer than now.
I'd rather see reasonable minimum wages, and higher taxes that are spent on universal health care, free education and social welfare in the usual Prioritarian way, though with very loose conditions on eligible recipients. Make it the least bureaucratic possible and the most friendly to side jobs and transitioning to self-sustenance as possible, and it will works optimally. The current systems in most countries are horrible, because they are designed to punish people who are creative and try to make money on the side - they are based on the stupid and outdated idea that you're either a successful entrepreneur, or an employee, or get social welfare. In reality, the system should allow anyone to transition between those three roles with ease, as it fits best in the current situation, and without being bogged down by existential sorrows all the time.
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