Ask HN: Will the US have the most trouble adapting to UBI in the age of AI?
Moving from the achievement mindset of the US to a life of relaxation and leisure might not be easy.
But I think of 3 demographics the most on this topic:
1. People with disabilities
A bit different situation, but one of my siblings is somewhat unique in their disabilities (I speak publicly about the topic), and their SSI money is not what you would call "rolling in it." They have still had to work very low level jobs to pay for their Section 8 housing.
2. Most people who are bad with money
Also, we're friends with more than a few couples who already receive hefty sums from the govt (for some reasons, understandably so); yet even at $150k in the South, they're unable to make it work. They are blackholes of money for kava, video games, eating out, Disney trips, etc. They're all useless people, in my not so humble opinion.
3. Entrepreneurial folks
Then there's my wife and I: no interest in UBI. We don't want it and wouldn't take it. For me, I enjoy what I do and don't like to be dependent on anyone, if I can help it. I grew up poor, so I want to remember everyday that if I don't apply myself, I won't eat.
Each of these demographics is going to respond differently. IMHO, #1 needs more support generally, #2 no amount of support or money will fix their problems, #3 I would get frustrated if it was forced on me, even by circumstance.
We're trending toward Saudi Arabia, where an ultra-wealthy class rules society.
In the gulf states, the usual pattern is that the citizens are rewarded with a share of the wealth extracted by exploitation of vast hordes of noncitizen laborers, so that they are invested in the exploitation, from which, on a per capita basis at least, the wealthy class receives much more.
This is already an order of magnitude lower than most other advanced economies.
I think it's true that Americans work pretty hard, but when given the opportunity will rather work towards early retirement or enabling a spouse to not work than taking leisure.
On the welfare front, there have also been huge expansions in the last few decades towards SSI and Disability payouts. It's not a UBI (since it's not Universal), but the future of the US would probably be an expansion of these existing programs to more or less provide the same results.
It's called the baby boomers aging and retiring (with a secondary factor of college participation going up): prime age labor force participation is very close to its all-time high [0], but the demographic bulge in (and moving farther into) the 55+ category drives the overall rate down, as, to a lesser extent, does college enrollment of people below prime age (<25) going up from the 1990s (peaking in the 2010s, but still above any time in the 1990s.)
Overall labor force participation rate uses the entire 16-and-older population as the divisor, which is useful for some things, but ignoring age demographics leads people to draw all sorts of bad conclusions from changes in that measure that are unsupportable once you look at the prime-age segment.
Especially if you compare the US internationally, the average American is such a laggard at working in comparison: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.ZS?most_rec....
So it must be true that Europeans either must work much longer careers, or have extremely high prime age participation for the numbers to make sense.
And if you overlay labor force participation data with GDP per capita, it's kind of crazy the efficiency that the US generates economic productivity from our workforce.
In your own link, the US rate is well ahead of the World rate, not a laggard. You probably made the mistake of comparing the World rate on that page (which tracks using the World Bank 15-64 working age population definition) with the US headline labor force participation rate (which uses the 16-and-over population as the denominator, not 15-64). But there is country information on the same World Bank page using consistent labor force definition for comparison to avoid that problem.
But, yes and for good reasons. UBI is easier to implement after you have fee healthcare and free education not paid from UBI.
In Finland we have free healthcare, education and guaranteed minimum income, minimum pension etc. But because it's not unconditional like UBI, it creates perverse outcomes where effective marginal tax rate for poor people can be over 100% and is often 80-90%. In that kind of situation UBI is easily tax rate neutral. Only thing preventing it is paternalistic attitudes.