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You don't need economists to disprove basic income works, you need evidence. All the evidence I've seen points to it working well.

A lot of economists work in finance, the industry that benefits the most from our financial system staying the way it is.

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No, it doesn't. Look up communism. Look up productivity in conservative communist countries. They had universal income and a huge group of society was milking the system. If you want to help people, deregulate street trade and small trade and you will be able to help unemployed people get simple jobs selling homemade products etc. Add $0,10 tax on all plastic bottles - force large supermarkets to buy them back from people. This will eliminate extreme poverty immediately. Remove brackets that force a person to forfeit welfare if they find part time job - instead dynamically reduce welfare when other income is introduced. Allow people to work and to earn money easily, and the will. Do not hand out money for free.

Hint, if you start off by assuming the person you're disagreeing with is so uneducated that they need to "look up communism", you may not be responding to what they are actually saying.

Case inpint: communism is nothing like basic income. With basic income, you always are rewarded for working: people who work are paid in addition to their basic income. If you wish to disagree with me, please tailor your disagreements to what is actually happening, not straw men.

Well, you are wrong. Not sure what communism you are talking about, but communism in countries like Poland and East Germany had exactly that. Everyone was receiving income no matter what. People working on higher positions were receiving higher income and were allowed to buy more. As simple as that.

But higher positions weren't based on the value of work, they were based on nepotism, corruption, etc. Incidentally, I think that's essentially how capitalism works too, but if you're going to claim that work determines pay in a capitalist economy, then you have to admit that it also does in a UBI system.

Your argument is mostly that people won't have an incentive to work, but one of the main arguments for UBI is the concept of the end of a need for low-skill jobs due to all the new machines taking them over. You should address this if you want to persuade the UBI proponents.

Unless your point is that people should have to work for work's sake to get that money, even if the work is useless.

There is a plenty of work that is hard to be done and is not economically viable. For me, any kind of unemployment should have a cap (let's say 6 months) after which person is forced to do free work (simple jobs like cleaning forests, planting trees etc.) and attend some courses that will help them to find a way to quit unemployment. 16 hours work and 4 hours education a week would be enough and would not interfere with searching for a job. People that get money without any requirement of work get lazy. They will not be incentivized to change their situation.

How does your myopic focus on punishing laziness deal with the situation where there aren't enough jobs to go around, i.e. where unemployment isn't caused by laziness? In your system, how does the worker create jobs? Given that unemployment Cody's is money, would you rather reduce the cost of unemployment or punish the unemployed, given that punishing the unemployed costs more?

The moment, where asking people to work in exchange for money is called punishment, we have failed as a society.

People that are for a long time on unemployment have a hard time to get back on the market. By forcing them to work few hours here and there in exchange for benefits forces them to leave houses and actually do something instead of sitting in front of TV. It mobilizes them. And it serves public as they will work jobs that benefit everyone. So instead of taxing rich and giving handouts, rich could see this as an investment in better tomorrow and be more willing to pay up.

The punishment I'm describing isn't work, the unemployed don't have that. The punishment is unemployment, and the associated depression, homelessness, starvation, etc.

You have yet to respond to what I said.

Your proposed system is to punish people for being unemployed while not giving them any jobs. You can wax poetic about the benefits of working all you want, but without any jobs, people can't work.

What evidence is it that you've seen?

I'm gonna guess that the "evidence" is programs where limited number of poor people were given money, no strings attached. I think that was some program/study in Africa. And the results were good but that has nothing to do with universal basic income and calling this "evidence" is akin to approving a drug for in vivo use, based on in vitro studies.

Or, you could use Google instead of guessing and using your wrong guesses to justify a straw man argument.

Here's a good place to start: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_pilots

Maybe I should have but even if I did, that wouldn't have changed my opinion and the in vitro/in vivo analogy still stands. The described pilots are limited in scope and period or have strings attached. This has nothing to do with UBI. It's easy to spend a $100M grant, give some money to the poor and pretend like you can make conclusions on the effect of UBI on a whole country.

Methinks that if the standard of evidence you require is an unlimited-length study of an entire nation, you may be seeing the bar of evidence too high because of presuppositions. There are plenty of things you believe based on much smaller studies.

Actually, there are things I believe, based on no studies at all but that's why they are called beliefs. The evidence bar for UBI must not be just high but extremely high because of the profound effect it can have on societies, for better or worse. My country's been through communism. And if a scientist looked at us 10-20 years after the regime started, I wouldn't be surprised if the conclusion was as positive as in the basic income pilots - literacy rate jumped through the roof, poverty was greatly reduced, practically no unemployment. We all know how these stories end but my father still reminisces about the "good old days when everyone had a job" sometimes.

On the other hand, I don't think my bar is set that high. Like I mentioned in another comment here, the biggest problem with these pilots is not the limited scope or the strings attached. The problem is that they are the exact reverse of the UBI version in question. Most of the pilots can be described as "rich giving money to the poor". The UBI version that we're discussing here is "poor giving money to the rich". Because that's exactly the net effect when you dismantle welfare programs and distribute the money to everyone - those who have been on welfare till now will receive less. Those who weren't will get more.

> All the evidence I've seen points to it working well.

Could you provide some references?

I'm at work right now so I don't have time to summarize, but here are a couple things worth looking at. The USA did studies and experiments with this back in the 60s/70s.

New Jersey Graduated Work Incentive Experiment. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015018521420;vi...

PDF warning: https://ia800309.us.archive.org/14/items/PovertyAmidPlentyTh...

Here is a list, with links to a lot of the documentation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_pilots

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