The title primed me to upvote the OP, because I think novel, potentially overlooked arguments against promising policies are valuable. However, reading the post from start to finish, I don’t think the core critique is communicated clearly. It seems to go from
the UBI making the “assumption that the state needs its citizens” “more wrong”, to
the UBI intensifying the divide between “contributors and noncontributors”, to
the UBI worsening, “in the long run”, the difficulties of integrating “the economically unnecessary parts of the population into society”, to, in the end
the UBI triggering “unforeseen consequences”, “a whole class of problems that arise out of the changed relationships between citizens, states and economies”
and these four critiques are not the same, and not interchangeable. Moreover, the point where the post ends up (critique 4) is not novel or different to those I’ve seen before. It’s the generic warning of unintended consequences that gets levelled against every public policy proposal ever, basic income included.
While I’m here, I’m uneasy with the handling of the side points as well. Paragraph 2 conflates Saudi Arabia’s population with its citizenry, and these aren’t the same thing. Yes, that sounds like pedantry, and for a lot of countries it would be pedantry, but Saudi Arabia might be literally the worst big country for which to elide the population-citizenry distinction. And the treatment of existing UBI critiques in the last paragraph is unduly generous. The claim that a UBI would “be impossible to get rid of if it is a failure” is very strong, and the notion that a UBI is mutually exclusive of “gradual approaches” puzzles me, since a UBI could certainly be introduced gradually (whether by gradually increasing the UBI allowance from zero, or by introducing the “U” in “UBI” slowly by incrementally expanding the range of people included).
I haven’t downvoted the post either, because I do like the idea of using Discussion as a forum for polishing half-baked arguments about topics popular on LW, and don’t (at the moment) want to discourage that activity.
The title primed me to upvote the OP, because I think novel, potentially overlooked arguments against promising policies are valuable. However, reading the post from start to finish, I don’t think the core critique is communicated clearly. It seems to go from
the UBI making the “assumption that the state needs its citizens” “more wrong”, to
the UBI intensifying the divide between “contributors and noncontributors”, to
the UBI worsening, “in the long run”, the difficulties of integrating “the economically unnecessary parts of the population into society”, to, in the end
the UBI triggering “unforeseen consequences”, “a whole class of problems that arise out of the changed relationships between citizens, states and economies”
and these four critiques are not the same, and not interchangeable. Moreover, the point where the post ends up (critique 4) is not novel or different to those I’ve seen before. It’s the generic warning of unintended consequences that gets levelled against every public policy proposal ever, basic income included.
While I’m here, I’m uneasy with the handling of the side points as well. Paragraph 2 conflates Saudi Arabia’s population with its citizenry, and these aren’t the same thing. Yes, that sounds like pedantry, and for a lot of countries it would be pedantry, but Saudi Arabia might be literally the worst big country for which to elide the population-citizenry distinction. And the treatment of existing UBI critiques in the last paragraph is unduly generous. The claim that a UBI would “be impossible to get rid of if it is a failure” is very strong, and the notion that a UBI is mutually exclusive of “gradual approaches” puzzles me, since a UBI could certainly be introduced gradually (whether by gradually increasing the UBI allowance from zero, or by introducing the “U” in “UBI” slowly by incrementally expanding the range of people included).
I haven’t downvoted the post either, because I do like the idea of using Discussion as a forum for polishing half-baked arguments about topics popular on LW, and don’t (at the moment) want to discourage that activity.