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In my experience, it's usually those with the "people are lazy" opinion that are against UBI, and those with the "people are industrious" opinion that are for UBI.

IMO, getting structure, meaning and belonging from your workplace is a fairly American phenomenon, and is a pretty poor place to get it. The traditional places to get this were from your church and family.

There are much better social constructs than the workplace. UBI should allow them to thrive. Let people self-organize according to their hobbies and taste rather than being thrown together by their job, and I think society will be much improved.

Given how many surnames are occupational (Fletcher, Butcher, Smith) I'd suggest that historically your "rank, profession or occupation" (as the Victorian census put it) was a major part of "structure, meaning and belonging". Especially if you go back to the era of apprenticeship and guilds.

I do wonder whether the moving away from the "career for life" mould has some part to play in the ennui that so many modern people seem to feel. Certainly some of the life events I'm proudest of over the long term are achieving professional qualifications - for instance commissioning as a military officer. It is a standard that society recognises your having reached, carries a degree of prestige and helps give a sense of place in the world.

In general, humans are interdependent for survival. Not like wolfes (independent) or ants (dependent). Everyone likes to feel useful, on a survival level, to others. It is like genetically built in (healthy) narcissism. UBI will keep people alive, but they must initiate meaning for themselves.

It's hard to measure economic output of people who do things that don't make money.

If a stay-at-home parent helps raise children and run errands, and as a result the breadwinner is more capable in their job and the children grow up to be stable and successful, shouldn't that kind of work be compensated?

Likewise a community volunteer can do a lot of good if they are not burdened by living expenses, yet often communities that could benefit most from volunteering are those which lack the funds to pay people outright.

It would also be a hell of a lot easier if I could work 20 hours a week and spend the other 20 working on my business without worrying about making ends meet and contributing to my retirement accounts.

"Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."

- Robert F Kennedy

UBI will give people who are industrious, but have fallen on hard times, a baseline to enable them to focus on improving their circumstances. If you've lost everything and you don't know where you're going to eat or how you're not going to freeze to death, those needs consume all of your time and thoughts. With UBI, you'd have those needs covered and could instead focus and look for work, get retrained, relocate for better prospects, go back to school, etc.

There was a study in London that hinted at this outcome for homeless persons. HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7016436

The UK has a welfare state that tries to ensure that people don't have to worry about freezing to death, starving or not being able to afford basic shelter.

The reasons for homelessness are complicated and often heavily influenced by drug/alcohol dependency and/or mental illness. Things like the Big Issue are an example of projects that tap into the industriousness of people that the GP mentioned.

There may be some people for whom the existing welfare state is too difficult to interact with but UBI is easy enough, but we should not believe that UBI will help everyone. Indeed the sheer cost of UBI is likely to require removing the funding available for the most needy.

Why not let people figure out how to spend their time themselves?

Millions of retirees do this succesfully every year, when they transition out of the workforce.

Saying that UBI is bad because people would a priori become restless, and that we therefore need to preserve a bullshit busywork corporate culture, is as much of an von-oben argument that UBI is bad because people would be lazy and sit on their asses all day.

Why do you think people getting a UBI would just sit on their asses? If I didn't have to work for a living, I'd be writing or making music all day or something like that.

Yes, this is exactly my thoughts. Sure I suppose some people will sit on their asses, but I think many more would pursue hobbies/activities that they are interested in. And when more people are able to participate in ”the pursuit of happiness" isn't that a good thing?

The point is not so much whether you'd be doing something or not, but whether what you would be doing would ultimately be of enough value to justify the money collected from others to fund your UBI.

You missed the point of UBI. There will be a whole class of people who won't be able to create enough value to justify the money needed to have a comfortable living. So we create UBI so they can still live comfortably. When most things are automated, there will be an excess of wealth. Why not use UBI as a transition tool to a post-scarcity economy?

"Comfortable living" is where UBI falls apart for me. What's comfortable? If my parents are [google|fb|apple] execs and I decide I want to just write poetry and live off UBI, will I be able to afford to live in the same neighborhood as them? The same city? The same region?

Clearly the answer is no, and it will result in the ghettoization of those that choose to take only UBI for income. This already happens with Section 8 housing, retirement havens (eg Florida), and so forth. There would be an even starker contrast between the haves (who perform "useful" work) and the have-nots (who subsist solely on UBI for whatever reason).

You make a very good point.

This is something that London (at least) does well. Council housing is available across the city and you will often find amongst some of the wealthiest parts of the city alternating blocks of council housing.

It might indeed be a pain point for those who bought their £1M town houses to then have to deal with the consequences of a whole council estate across the street but it has (so far) prevented the ghetto-ization of swathes of our capital which seems to affect Paris for instance which has less of a mix of housing.

your criticism is spot on. There will be a have / have not divide. It will make today's inequality look quaint. The top 20th percentile in IQ/productivity will live way better than the rest, but they will probably be creating 99% of the value.

So what's your solution? With the upcoming automation wave coming, UBI is way better than the status quo. What is better than UBI?

What makes you think IQ or productivity will have anything to do with it?

Predictions of a post-scarcity economy are overblown. From the perspective of the basic necessities of food, clothing, and shelter, we in the US are already in a post-scarcity economy. A "comfortable" living, though, is eminently relative. Many of the poor in the US live more comfortable lives than many in less developed countries. It's unclear why they are entitled to a particular standard of living that is rather generous by global standards just by virtue of their living in the US.

>From the perspective of the basic necessities of food, clothing, and shelter, we in the US are already in a post-scarcity economy.

Not quite, we are post-scarcity on the production of those items, but the economy hasn't caught up with it yet, which is why so many in the US severely lack one or more of those necessities .

As William Gibson put it, "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed"

>Many of the poor in the US live more comfortable lives than many in less developed countries.

I would be surprised if you mean the US can't or shouldn't strive to provide better for its citizens ~300 million citizens until all other countries are caught up for the rest of the 7 billion people on Earth, which leaves me unsure about what you're trying to communicate with this.

>It's unclear why they are entitled to a particular standard of living that is rather generous by global standards just by virtue of their living in the US.

Clarity here depends on your perspective. From the perspective of humanity as a whole you are absolutely correct. From the perspective of citizens within a country the government's (ostensible) purpose for existing is to provide for their quality of life either directly by use of collected taxes or indirectly by facilitating socioeconomic activity.

>Not quite, we are post-scarcity on the production of those items, but the economy hasn't caught up with it yet, which is why so many in the US severely lack one or more of those necessities

I'm unaware of any significant number of US residents suffering from malnutrition due to lack of access to healthy food or exposure due to insufficient clothing or shelter. That is not to say there are none, but most are due to factors other than the lack of access to basic necessities.

>I would be surprised if you mean the US can't or shouldn't strive to provide better for its citizens ~300 million citizens until all other countries are caught up for the rest of the 7 billion people on Earth, which leaves me unsure about what you're trying to communicate with this.

What I am saying is that I question the assertion that everyone deserves a particular quality of life even if it must be attained at the expense of another.

Even if I were to accept that, the complications of such a position are legion. What constitutes the appropriate quality of life? What happens in an economic downturn when that minimum quality of life is no longer sustainable? Etc.

Its not fair to say, living in America is an accidental privilege. That doesn't credit America with any responsibility for its own prosperity. Its the culture, and the resources of course, that make America the engine of commerce that it is.

I'm having some trouble parsing your intended message. Is this an agreement or disagreement?

Agreement I guess. I was thinking of the parent comment including "It's unclear why they are entitled to a particular standard of living that is rather generous by global standards just by virtue of their living in the US. "

We are already sharing the value created by some people to other people with no more justification other than the other people being human too, and living in the same society as the first.

We say that noone should starve, and we redistribute wealth to food stamps.

We say that noone should die of preventable disease or injury, so we redistribute wealth to medicare and medicaid an emergency care.

We say that everyone should have an education, so we redistribute wealth to provide free public schools.

I'm not saying this country is doing a very good job of the above, and I'm not saying there's no opposition even to these measures, but we commonly accept this redistribution of wealth with no regard given to the value-adding abilities of the people receiving it.

So UBI is not some brand new thing we have to justify, it's more of the same, and the justification is the same.

Between TANF/SNAP and Medicaid expansion -- for the states that have gone the route of removing the asset tests and increasing the income thresholds, we're getting close to effectively already having UBI. A "true" UBI isn't phased-out directly, but rather is merely eclipsed by marginal taxes, but the end-result is pretty similar. It's not money in your pocket to spend on whatever you want, but it's a substantial safety net.

I guess the real mental switch is instead of allocating these subsidies to specific buckets like "food", "health care", "housing", and having massive programs to administer and oversee the spending, can government actually get its head around the concept of just writing a check to be spent however? Maybe the problem is... who are the special interests greasing the wheels in congress to get the subsidy passed, when no industry in particular is benefiting from the subsidy?

Aren't we writing a check to be spent however already for senior citizens?

There are actually different justifications for your examples above. For example, we don't let people starve because we consider any person, by mere virtue of their existence, as worthy of food. The same is not true for education. We consider the societal effects of an educated populace and workforce as valuable enough to justify the money we spend on it. UBI is not at all more of the same and it absolutely requires justification for its immense cost.

Do you thinking under pinning this is a belief that you would eventually be very good at making music and be recognized for it? This may not be the case, but, if it is, is there a point of discouragement that would lead you to stop pursuing hobbies or other passions?

There's one detail I'd like to address:

> I actually think we simply handed this conversation over to the free market in the 20th C and that answer isn't going to work in this century.

The free market / globalization dogma only took hold in the 1980s, under Reagan (in the US) and Thatcher (in the UK). Before that, the economy was much more highly regulated, taxes were over 80% in some categories, labor was much more powerful, and governments ran or controlled many industries.

(Remember that under these conditions, in the 1950s and 60s, the U.S. experienced possibly its greatest period of economic performance ever. The 1970s were a period of recession, at least partly driven by OPEC's oil embargo on the West.)

The issues you attribute to the 21st C have existed since the 1980s: The economy has grown but only for a very small minority. Everyone else's incomes have stagnated (while costs have increased, especially for health care and higher education). The benefits never 'trickled down' as promised (and what a condescending economic strategy!) and inequality has exploded. With labor weakened, ordinary workers have much less voice in business and government - and not surprisingly, they've been less able to secure the benefits of economic growth while those with a stronger voice have done exceptionally well.

I should say: The adoption of these policies and the stagnation of wages are coincident, but I don't know enough to say there is a causal relationship. I do know the problem has been around since the 1980s; it's just that the consequences have accumulated: What was argued be a temporary problem is now, decades later, proven to be a structural one, and the inequality has widened to a chasm.

"The problem I see w/ UBI is that contrary to popular belief, people aren't lazy, they're industrious. People like to feel useful. And people long for meaning in their lives and their work."

You should be aware that you're deducing this by looking at the results of an enduring, pervasive, and almost universal education of people in this regard that was enforced over millennia! This education was constantly discouraging (and even weeding out) the individuals that were not so eager to earn a living to look for different (illegal) shortcuts to solve their material condition. I think that you'll change your view when you'll allow yourself to widen the selection of (kinds of) people you interact with. Hint: you may start visiting the nearest prison and meet up with inmates condemned for thefts.

Please, don't take the good things for granted, and definitely don't let our current society dominated by "industrious" people you see now become a myth for future generations!

>risk and ambiguity necessary to be an entrepreneur.

UBI removes the risk.

>We're really talking about finding ways to give structure and meaning to those folks, the large middle class in America.

Firstly I disagree that people need baby sitting. If they do then that is a huge cultural problem. The beautiful thing about UBI though is that your statement won't matter because the slightly more industrious will round up the bored and make projects and people will partake because it gives them meaning. I think you are underestimating the power of the crowd.

> UBI removes the risk.

It raises the floor on how bad things can get, but it absolutely doesn't eliminate the risk.

With that logic the floor gets raised when you work a job too.

True, but wouldn't more people get out there and try starting up something new and exciting if there wasn't the risk of penury to discourage them?

There are plenty of people who would simply sit around and do drugs all day. It all depends on the path your journey leads you down. The "privileged" are fortunate enough to have developed "better" survival and sustainability skills in accordance with what is labeled as a higher "class". A path to healthy personal culture is essential to one's success in life.

I disagree with your account of the privileged; there is no shortage of them who choose to "simply sit around and do drugs all day" either.