This is part of ‘specific numbers matter’. In first-world countries, almost nobody _literally starves on the street_ already, so that UBI number would be 0. Most casual discussion I hear assumes UBI will be somewhere near a state minimum-wage job, not enough to live in a nice part of town, but enough to crowd out at least some current jobs.
In the abstract, I like your “good riddance to bad jobs” attitude. Unfortunatlely, I don’t know which concrete low-paying jobs I’d rather leave undone than to have an unhappy worker doing them.
Unfortunatlely, I don’t know which concrete low-paying jobs I’d rather leave undone than to have an unhappy worker doing them.
Me neither. It’s possible that this is a bad idea, and that we’d end up with a worse society overall; but in general I’m skeptical of this, since you can make those jobs more attractive by increasing their pay; and if they really are valuable then they should still produce net value even if they were more expensive to fund. This logic doesn’t work in every possible case and it’s not that hard to think of counterexamples, but in general there’s a big gap between productivity and wages, and a UBI could be something that would help fix that.
But of course nobody knows how it actually works out until we try.
This is part of ‘specific numbers matter’. In first-world countries, almost nobody _literally starves on the street_ already, so that UBI number would be 0. Most casual discussion I hear assumes UBI will be somewhere near a state minimum-wage job, not enough to live in a nice part of town, but enough to crowd out at least some current jobs.
In the abstract, I like your “good riddance to bad jobs” attitude. Unfortunatlely, I don’t know which concrete low-paying jobs I’d rather leave undone than to have an unhappy worker doing them.
Me neither. It’s possible that this is a bad idea, and that we’d end up with a worse society overall; but in general I’m skeptical of this, since you can make those jobs more attractive by increasing their pay; and if they really are valuable then they should still produce net value even if they were more expensive to fund. This logic doesn’t work in every possible case and it’s not that hard to think of counterexamples, but in general there’s a big gap between productivity and wages, and a UBI could be something that would help fix that.
But of course nobody knows how it actually works out until we try.