Comment by marcus_holmes
6 months ago
Which is exactly the thing they tested multiple times and found to be wrong.
People get bored doing nothing, and enjoy contributing to their community.
No, they're not going to go get shitty factory jobs. But that's OK, because all those jobs are now automated and done by robots.
But they are going to go and do something useful, because that's what people do. The anti-UBI trope that "given basic income, everyone will just sit around on their arses watching TikTok videos" has been proven wrong in every study that measured it.
> No, they're not going to go get shitty factory jobs. But that's OK, because all those jobs are now automated and done by robots. Nonsense. There are tens of millions of jobs that cannot be automated in the near future, which people would certainly never do if they had UBI. America just outsources them to poorer countries, so you're clueless.
The key to universal basic income is that it is basic. There are many jobs that cannot be automated but with the right incentive even under UBI people will do them.
What incentive exists for someone to work in a coal mine - which is both physically taxing and guarantees lung problems by 40 - other than earning enough money so that their kids do not have to do the same thing?
You can replace coal mines above with a million other things, I chose a dramatic, niche example.
The fact is that in recorded history, there have been almost no instances of economic setups without the downtrodden. I like efforts like UBI being made to address that, but it is important to address the fact that UBI itself is not the final solution. It is still possible that we reach a working solution eventually(who knows when?) by exploring things like UBI though. A lot of online discourse simply lies in a narrow band of "UBI = communism which didn't work in the specific instance of the soviet union" and on the other side "opposing UBI = oligarch".
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