What will they do about births and deaths?
Will the basic income be extended to a child or will children be left poor while their parents get BI?
If babies get added to the BI payroll, doesn't this incentivize baby making?
Will the basic income be extended to a child or will children be left poor while their parents get BI?
If babies get added to the BI payroll, doesn't this incentivize baby making?
Edit: the point being that children are the ones who suffer most from poverty, and investing in them has the most long term potential. But of course we don't want people to have kids just for the money, hence the difficulty.
[1] http://www.sowetanlive.co.za/news/2012/05/25/misuse-of-socia...
[2] http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/grants-used-to-suppor...
[3] http://www.parent24.com/Baby/Toddler_1-2/care_nutrition/The-...
Whether society subsidises it or not people are going to continue procreating, many irresponsibly (don't have financial ability to support their children). However are you arguing then that these children who happen to be born into poverty should then be left in it without government/societal help?
First of all, UBI should ideally be enough to eliminate poverty. Parents might have to make some sacrifices to take care of the children (forgoing personal luxuries or taking a low wage job). Once the child is of age, they would receive their own basic income so there wouldn't necessarily be a cycle of poverty.
Moreover, we should incentivize child transfers by subsidizing adoption.
If they're so irresponsible, why would giving them more money necessarily help the children to live a better quality of life?
Many of the social benefits a working Western society wants depends upon a growing population, like social security.
To be clear, they depend on a growing labor force.
However, the whole reason to investigate UBI is that we're likely nearing a future where labor is not a dominant factor of production. It seems unlikely that we'll have full employment in the future, particularly if there's UBI.
In an economy where labor is not a necessary constraint or driver of production, it seems entirely unclear why having a growing population (without a growing labor force) would be beneficial.
Not to mention that for the forceable future there are plenty of countries desperate to export excess populations. If you need to increase the population, there's no need to subsidize it.
Sure, but only in the sense that they're the ones who will be living it. Fewer children doesn't mean society won't have a future. It just means they'll each have more resources.
The world is not at risk of underpopulation. If that were actually a serious concern, we could take measures to mitigate it but all evidence points to there being plenty of people in the world already. Some wealthy countries might have declining populations, but there are plenty of countries with overpopulation to offset that.
Compare:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
A fertility rate of 2 would be necessary just to replace the current population, without any growth (assuming that all children reach adulthood and breed in turn, which is a big assumption for some of these countries).
Why does world population "need to decline"?
I suppose the alternative is to eat resources at the replacement rate - this is what sustainability is supposed to be about.
Or perhaps some new technology will fix it.
No, we aren't (running out of resources).
The price of oil today is moderately higher (in constant dollars) than it was in 1946, but only moderately so.
http://inflationdata.com/articles/charts/inflation-adjusted-...
Pretty much every jump in the intervening years is directly attributable to political turmoil (e.g., war) rather than any real decline in the amount of oil available. Note that today's moderately higher prices are in an environment with active war going on in Syria and Iraq, historically two of the largest producers. If it weren't for that, oil prices might well have dropped below 1946 prices (again, in constant dollars).
Similar graphs hold for other commodities.
According to the pundits in the 1970s, we were supposed to be at the "Soylent Green" stage long before now. We aren't.
Old Man Malthus claimed that we were on the verge of the Soylent Green world (though of course he didn't call it that) way back in 1798.
But like rainforests are going away real quick.
2) Water doesn't actually get used up.
2) Aquifers do.
(that's part of a wider problem with trying to draw any inferences about how a basic income might work in a developed country from this. It's perfectly reasonable to believe the results and the appropriate design might be precisely opposite)
>We'll choose the communities mostly for operational reasons. We're experts at delivering cash in very poor rural areas, and that's likely what we'll do with the pilot. Within the communities, we want to test a universal basic income, so we will enroll all full-time residents of a community.
- from the actual fund-raising page - https://givedirectly.org/basic-income
So, they aren't incentivizing baby making between families. But there may be between communities. That said, as people are elevated socioeconomically birthrate tends to decrease.
Edited to add: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility