The point of the U in UBI is that you can discard the expensive bureaucracy. The article proposes keeping it as well as UBJs! Literally missing the entire point. But providing lots more jobs for bureaucrats to administer both...
Has there been any research into how to set up UBI that actually remains politically/bureaucratically stable? It seems like any implementation would be extremely vulnerable to media cycles highlighting the plight of some poor single mother who didn't spend her UBI wisely and now can't feed her kids, or a rich billionaire who pocketed his UBI rather than giving it to charity. It doesn't matter how infrequent these cases are, it would happen a nonzero amount of times and that's enough to get media stories trending about it. In the face of that, people would start wanting to build in exceptions or adjustments, at which point you end up with the expensive bureaucracy again.
I do think it's true that "people suffer from lack of work AND lack of money." That is, if you just give people enough money to survive, and nothing to do, they still suffer.
It's not really valid to compare the experiences of old retired people and working age people (or younger). Age is a major complicating factor. And, at least in the U.S., we already give money to old people; it's called Social Security and Medicare.
The question is, what do we do with 22 year olds who can't find work? What will the rest of their life be like if they go on the equivalent of Social Security and Medicare at 22? Anecdotally I think we all have a sense of the potential for problems when young people are too idle.
They’ll need to find a job, since drugs tend to be expensive luxuries.
If people freed from the necessity of work can't figure out anything better to do with their lives than consume entertainment and get high all day, I find that rather sad. It's still not as sad as forcing them to LARP at obsolete agriculture on arable land that used to be productively mechanized. At least if people who can't be matched with genuinely productive jobs stay on their couches all day they're not actively sabotaging the productivity of the remaining market economy.
I'm ok with governments employing people to do productive tasks that still require human labor -- many others have mentioned elder care or fixing aging infrastructure, for example -- but I think that the specific agricultural proposal floated in the original article is terrible. Unlike the author, I'm also not anxious on behalf of other people who might end up "deprived" of a time clock and obeying a boss 5 days a week. I'm not going to tell them that I know better if they think that games are more enjoyable than farming like it's 1899.
Which would be a rebuttal if doubling food cost wasn't an expensive luxury in context; people choosing drugs without food is a self-limiting problem, and most optimistic (and, unreasonably so, in my view) near term UBI proposals barely hit the federal poverty line for a one-person household.
You probably still can't get cheap cocaine, since it doesn't have a cheap synthesis route yet, but every major class of recreational drugs at least has potent, cheap-to-manufacture synthetic or semi-synthetic members. In the case of weed it's probably not even worth pursuing synthetic analogs to THC given how easy it is to grow.
IMO choosing to indulge in some of these drugs, without medical need, may be akin to a slow-motion suicide. But I'm not in favor of outlawing suicide either.
You're forgetting that these people can still vote. I can imagine a lot of ways that promises of bread and circuses could be used to form them into a dangerous voting bloc.
There are a lot of cases where introducing untrained human labor into an existing production process has a marginal productivity less than zero. Adding random people to a process that doesn't need more people, or needs people with specific skills, isn't just poor value for effort. It's negative value for effort. Every additional hour that somebody who doesn't know what they're doing tries to "help," they're destroying more.
These caveats only apply if people are assigned pointless jobs that they're not even good at. It's destructive to replace high-productivity mechanized agriculture with random unemployed wielding hand tools. It's safe, though still IMO insulting and a bad idea, to make people perform some pointless but harmless pseudo-white-collar job like adding up columns of random numbers with pencil and paper. It actually adds value (though perhaps not a lot) if governments can assign jobs that people can actually perform competently and that machines aren't great at yet, like collecting litter.
UBI (or uncontrolled UBJ) that lets somebody do drugs all day makes society worse.
If you're totally incapable of work, the US has a program for that today, its called SSI, Supplemental Security Income. Not to be confused with Social Security or SSDI, this program is paid for with income taxes, not social security taxes. There are ~5 million people in the US on SSI.
Are you looking forward to your mandatory assigned job? Or are you imagining that it's just for other people?
Imagine a future that includes the options today + a few additional options for employment. That is all I'm describing.
Very few people starve in the US: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/937204945379454978
You were the one coming up with government-mandated jobs for people who are deemed unable to work. If you frame your policy as government jobs for those who have no alternative, what else would you call it?
And the people who misallocate their UBI and can't afford food? It seems what UBI supporters truly desire is a maternal figure in their lives.
At the end of the day, there has to be some personal responsibility, true.
It seems what UBI supporters truly desire is a maternal figure in their lives.
Not really; if I had UBI I'd almost certainly donate it to charity while I was working. My interest in UBI is as a low-overhead, efficient mechanism for social stability.