Yes, of course giving people money makes their lives better. It especially works when a very small subset of the population receives such treatment, such that their relative income is higher than those outside the experiment.

The issue with UBI is that enacting it at scale has two huge problems:

1. Financing it. These programs are monumentally expensive. You need to get the money from somewhere. The easiest place to take it is via the money printer and the second is from the rich.

If you do it via the money printer, it's a self-own in terms of inflationary impact.

If you do it by taxing the rich, you wind up hobbling and punishing your most productive citizens. Look at China's economic situation right now to see how ultimately unproductive that can be.

2. Diminishing effects. A bit more money is great when everybody else in your local economy didn't get it. But when everybody gets it, things just become more expensive.

The USA did this during the COVID era. We basically implemented UBI. We expanded the M1 money supply from $4T to $18T and largely handed it out in a diffuse way. For the first 6 months it was awesome. And then shortages started spiking and inflation started creeping in. We ultimately had to roll it back.

I don't think these problems are fundamentally solvable.

Instead, we should foster competition, incentivize innovation, and let markets do their thing. This will create lower prices for basic goods and create employment opportunities so people can have what they need for cheap, under the financing of their own effort.