The Fatal Trap UBI Boosters Keep Falling Into | Hacker News Reader

The Fatal Trap UBI Boosters Keep Falling Into

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31 pointsharitha-j85 comments

I think this goes to something I’ve been seeing a lot of lately. People will hold an opinion for emotional reasons instead of logical reasons, and those speaking to them will get frustrated trying to “logic” them out of it (evidence, studies, facts, etc). It doesn’t work because they came to the opinion first and veneered it with logic afterwards. If you tear down the logic, the emotional substructure is still there. I have no idea how to solve this. The only people who have abandoned emotional beliefs I’ve seen have to come to that realization on their own.

This is in general how the human brain works. Unfortunately.

IMO this describes the author of the article. They have an emotional discomfort with various inequities & inequalities which drive their advocacy of UBI & other measures and they aren't interested reason, arguments or logic. The guy has been obsessed with UBI since he was 15, no one is going to talk him out of it, no matter how bad the evidence is.

>emotional discomfort with various inequities & inequalities

you say it like thats a bad thing

Not at all.

Feeling emotional discomfort with inequities and inequalities is a common human trait, probably nearly universal.

But there’s no reason to suspect that that discomfort is a good guide toward solutions that help more than harm.

That sort of facile engagement with the problem is what gives us disastrous ideologies like communism.

Potential confusion of valid moral arguments with emotional arguments, though.

I mean, one might conceptually bundle together practicality, pragmatism, and logic, and then say that caring about anything or having any principles or values is emotional and illogical. (This also gives us disastrous ideologies like communism, and may also be used to force favorite ideas because they're "scientific".)

what dont you like about communism? do you even know? not a huge fan of extremism personally im just curious on your take.

The article itself seems quite reasonable - why do you say the author isn’t interested in logic?

I had a friend who was a Christian evangelist to cult members. He said that they would be a cult member as long as they wanted to be a cult member. The only way was to move them to the place where they didn't want to be in the cult anymore.

The way he did it was to preach their cult's doctrine to them. "OK, according to your church's teaching, here's the requirements for you to be saved. How are you doing? Are you going to make it? How much harder are you going to have to work in order to make it? Will even working harder be enough to get you there?" When the weight of what their belief system actually demanded of them sunk in, some of them didn't want to be in the cult anymore.

Some of them. A few. Not many. But some.

your friend was trying to get them out of one cult and into another?

>something I’ve been seeing a lot of lately

It's not only recent, according to this quote from 300 years ago.

Jonathan Swift — 'It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.'

We'll never have a ubi in a opportunistic greed based economy. How are you going to convince "mr i want all the resources" that they should share for the wellbeing of other people (and indirectly for the benefit of themselves but they dont look that far)? its about the foundations our economic systems are built on.

edit: oh and without sounding too conspiratorial hopefully... how are you going to control a populace that isnt desperate, downtrodden and uneducated... /end conspiracy

You're describing the tragedy of the commons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

I don't personally advocate for UBI, but I'll counter your question with another question; how are individuals supposed to have class mobility in an economy where the majority of transactions are speculative? The traditional "work hard and retire eventually" mindset is not going to last forever. Today's workers are paying yesterday's pensioners.

A ubi based economy would require more protectionism from govt of finite resources and perhaps even a carrot based incentive system to get people to do less desirable activities. I dont think a ubi economy would have to be entirely flat in terms of wealth, there should always be incentives for people who want more. I'd rather have more sharing of a protected commons than a few oligarchs having it all to themselves.

Just a small digression on the singular notion of “emotional reasons”.

One can be dispassionate and distant from one’s beliefs and still difficult to convince, because we all harbor some forms of _private reasoning_ about how the world works. If I have strong personal beliefs, they may be gathered from experience of decades. Not going to easily change my world view.

Add maybe a few _false beliefs_ for the xtra complication? (Not even considering the paradox of lying).

Finally, the emotional spin appears as _cynical reasoning_, that toxic mix of anger and resentment. The logic-warrior who ventures here is brave indeed.

I think there are a bunch of uncomfortable gut reactions that people just "conveniently leave out" of the argument.

Stuff like "why should I pay for this", or "why should they get to be lazy while I work" or "I don't feel like I should work as hard"

So they find other arguments, in a doth-protest-too-much-other-logic-arguments way.

>UBI-related experiments consistently find evidence that no participant responds to UBI experiments by dropping out of the labor force.

I'm not familiar with the details of these experiments but the first thing that strikes me is that this cannot be experimentally tested without guaranteeing participants a lifetime of UBI. They don't drop out of the labor force because they know it's temporary.

You wouldn't quit your job if you're only promised 2 years of UBI, because the cost that resigning has upon your future employability may be greater than the money from the UBI experiment. Or if you did quit, it would be to make a gambit (such as going back into schooling or training) that will leave you better off once the experiment is over.

The only reliable experiment design would be putting a few million per participant into some guaranteed annuities fund.

Buddy I’ve seen people quit jobs over way pettier things without UBI.

But have you seen a population of people quit jobs over pettier things? The studies aren't based on just one or two individuals.

A group is a collection of individuals. Anecdotes != data and whatnot, but by my observations people don’t always make purely rational economic decisions, so if you were going to a see people quitting over UBI you’d already see it.

Of course this hypothesis is as based in reality as yours, so the only thing we can do is try and find out.

With your caveat of "Anectodes != data and whatnot, but by my observations", people don't make rational food decisions when given free money. They tend to spend on snacks and sugar, not on veggies. Unless discipline is enforced, free money is a disaster.

Are you also going to have "free health care" with UBI ? That would be cataclysmic as you would need to also give free diabetic and obesity treatments until end of lifespan.

What happens if nobody works and how will we afford it are absolutely valid questions. A sovereign fund might answer both

> nobody works

That isn’t behavior that occurred in the pilot problems they talk about it.

All the participants in those pilot programs *know* they are in a time-limited pilot programs and that in a handful of years the money will dry up. This is a major flaw in all UBI studies which make them all but useless.

It will take 15 or 20 years before any UBI could be considered permanent enough for a majority of people to change their work habits.

Two or three generations would be my guess

People’s habits are not usually driven by such long term thinking, but I think there’s a more fundamental thing you’re missing: People will continue to work as long as there is an advantage to working. In any well designed UBI system, those who are on UBI and continue to work will make more money than those on UBI alone, so most people will continue to work.

Not to mention that most people enjoy working as it gives them a sense of purpose.

I agree and disagree with you. These studies should be done with guaranteed payments for life. Otherwise it is just not representative.

I do believe that people would still work though. Personally I would like to do a useful job with real benefit to society, but the low pay makes it not feasible. I would still want to work part time at least instead of not at all.

Golden Visas on sale now...

>A sovereign fund might answer both

Barring AGI and a swarm of drones/nanobots, you still need people to work. Money is just a unit of exchange. If everyone on earth has a billion dollars, but nobody wants to work, nobody is going to be driving around in lambos.

This might seem outrageous but I expect to see it in the next couple of decades as AI and robots continue to get better and cheaper

Utopia or dystopia? Probably both, unevenly distributed

We will need people to work, but not everyone will have the capacity to fulfill that work, as jobs become increasingly specialized and the floor goes up

Not a major concern because any financially sustainable UBI is going to be so extremely miserly that most will choose to work. In other words, UBI will allow you to live on rice and beans in a flat with three roommates on the wrong side of the tracks.

It's worth asking: how is funding of other entitlement programs going?

We're (more or less every western civilization) going to have trouble funding UBI for seniors who can't work even if they wanted to; never mind UBI for working age populations.

This seems a bit muddled - he seems to say UBI boosters should avoid debating "no one will work" and "we can't afford it" because then critics will ask "Did the people who got the UBI ‘work’ as much as the people who didn’t?".

I don't see why you shouldn't debate such stuff. My take is UBI wouldn't be a good idea just now for such reasons but in the future we may be able to answer that that's fine because the robots will do the work as needed.

Who will clean the toilets under UBI?

I'm interested in answers that mostly preserve the status quo, and in answers that propose more radical shifts.

People paid the real value of having clean toilets.

That is what they're paid now, says capitalism.

If you're unhappy with that being called the "real value", what should be called the "real value"? That is, how would you define it?

For starters, I wouldn't consider anything valued under a threat of ending up on streets to be "the real value". If you can be scared by the prospect of losing your job ruining your life, it's not valuation - it's coercion. You can't end up with market valuation if you are forced to take an unqualified job just to live, this will massively undervalue such jobs. You don't find out what's the value of having clean toilets - you only find out what's the lowest wage people willing to do this job will manage to live on.

I basically agree that it's coercion, but I think it's hard to draw a line where coercion ends and "free choice" begins.

Maybe we could get society to agree that everyone should get some basic set of inalienable rights that includes rights to housing, enough food to eat, etc. Enough so that losing a job didn't threaten your life or health. This is basically what social welfare systems already do. But I think that the quality of life afforded by taking social welfare instead of working must be kept lower than the quality of life afforded by taking any form of work, otherwise there's no incentive to do unpleasant jobs. If social welfare enables a completely comfortable life, I think one of two things would happen: either the price needed to get a toilet cleaned would shoot up to a level that would basically inhibit most ordinary businesses from forming, or it would become the norm for people to clean their own toilets at work. The latter wouldn't be so bad, I think.

How about a "pseudo UBI" that only pays for basic necessities like rent, utilities, groceries and basic healthcare?

Any kind of a universal safety net would allow human civilization as a whole to chill out a bit, and could also reduce various petty scams and/or the damage they cause to people.

In 2025, the US Federal government pulled in a a grand total of $5.16 trillion in revenue.

Giving all 258 million adult US citizens $1000 a month totals to $3.096 trillion per year.

Giving them all $2000 a month totals to $6.192 trillion per year - more than all US tax revenue from all sources combined.

Of course, we already have a $1.7 trillion deficit, with $38 trillion and counting in debt without the UBI, and I assume you're not planning on defaulting on our $1 trillion+ in annual interest payments on the debt either, right?

How about Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which by themselves take up over half of the entire federal budget, are we keeping those too?

If you'd like, we could confiscate 100% of the assets of every billionaire that's a US citizen and hope to sell all of the non-liquid asssets at market prices, that'll get us 9 months worth of current federal spending levels - less if we're adding UBI on top and not getting rid of any other programs.

Now if you want to get creative, we could keep funding the military and use it to go after all of the other global billionaires, that'll get us almost through a full 4-year presidential cycle, at the low, low cost of invading just about every other sovereign nation on earth to rob their citizens, too.

We could also have the treasury start minting trillion dollar coins to both pay off the debt and fund the UBI, but I don't think you're going to like your $2000 monthly UBI check as much when market rent on a studio is $200,000 a month.

If you have better ideas on how to pay for this, I'm all ears.

Pretty much every economist who has ever thought seriously about UBI has already given an answer. Most of the funding would come from abolishing progressive income taxes. Instead, the highest (or second highest) bracket would start at 0. With the current federal tax rates and incomes, that would raise an additional ~$3 trillion/year.

How will it affect your life any more than the military getting trillions and AI companies gobbling billions right now?

That's already what UBI is.

I mean as opposed to just handing out cash, that some critics fear people would just blow on hookers and blow.

A) attempting to police that is extremely, extremely expensive not to mention absolutely chockful of corruption and abuse

B) repeated studies and measurements have shown that attempting to police it just doesn't do anything.

Sounds like the ”Country that tried nothing says it’s impossible” meme.

> Issue special debit cards for UBI

> Issue special machines/payment processors for those cards to registered merchants, landlords, and utility and healthcare providers.

We have tried that. It's cheaper and more effective to just give people a wad of cash.

But people who are against UBI by default seem to want some kind of "policing" before they'll consider it.

Various countries have various things that operate on similar principles, such as transit cards etc.

Hell, even VIDEO GAMES have done this: Special "premium" currencies that you can use only for certain things, buy with realmoney or earn through various activities, and cannot trade.

The UK is doing that

Without requiring people to seek work?

The UK system is something of a mess with perverse incentives. There is 'job seekers allowance' based on seeking work but a lot of people either work and pay taxes or go on disability which you can do by saying you are depressed and the receive income from the taxes on the working people.

The situation makes it quite hard to work if you are on disability and similar which has led the the numbers shooting up

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskBrits/comments/1mxxksa/whats_dri...

If you extrapolate the graph in the link in a few decades no one will work and we'll all live by claiming benefits off each other. UBI might be better.

The problem that UBI will never get over is the fact that it just smells like something suspicious. It smells like something capitalists can exploit.

Landlords and other oligopolistic goods-sellers with a lot of leverage and cartel-like dynamics can now count on a base income for everyone. I don’t see how low income housing doesn’t instantly becomes more expensive across the board, with profits funneled to established landlords.

At least with SNAP/EBT, your landlord can’t take that money.

UBI is sold as a cheap program to run because it eliminates the application and verification processes involved with existing benefits programs. But those same concepts could be applied to existing programs.

Other pro-worker reforms could also replace the whole UBI idea, where UBI just feels like a band-aid for a society with worsening income inequality and increasing corporate control. It has a “fix the symptom” vibe.

As opposed to all the regular kinds of shitty behaviour landlords inflict on their tenants already? I feel like "because the money people will continue to misbehave" is absolutely not a reason to avoid doing something.

UBI is unique. When I get a raise at work, my landlord doesn’t know. If you implement UBI, every landlord knows that every tenant in the whole country has $xxxx more per month to pay.

Literally 100% of them will raise the rent and there won’t be anything anyone can do about it.

This is only a problem when you have very limited housing supply, so you need to combine it with things like better housing/zoning policies and rent control.

This is only true in places where there are more people trying to rent than places.

In theory, having more capital available in the face of a landlord raising rent an obnoxious amount will incentivize people who aren't making much to move somewhere with a lower CoL that they might not have been able to make work otherwise because of uncertainty in the amount of time they'd be out of work or their base level of money available for that time.

I don't think it is this simple. Even with UBI, there will be varying quality of rentals, with nicer ones being more expensive. If every landlord jacked up the price, demand would shift to cheaper, lower quality rentals. More people will get roommates etc, reducing demand entirely.

In addition, every seller of a good/service could do the same. They can't all increase prices to extract the full $xxxx a month. There are much more complex dynamics at play then just "landlords will raise rent enough to extract the full UBI benefit."

I would say it’s meant to be exploited in the way you are describing and really just a progressive tax mechanism, but instead of hitting zero tax at zero income, you hit zero higher and can start to pay “negative tax”.

I think you’re right conceptually, I just have skepticism on whether this design is more progressive or regressive.

> At least with SNAP/EBT, your landlord can’t take that money.

You think people don't pay their rent with SNAP/EBT?

I've got news for you - they do, by selling their benefits to someone with cash at a horrible rate. To pay rent, put gas in their cars, buy alcohol... all the things money is necessary for.

Landlords can do that to you because you have to live where the jobs are. UBI lets you move to a cheap part of the country, of which there are still many.

One way is to attempt to take some of the profit motive out of housing. You can still have a private housing market while guaranteeing some base level of permanent housing for the entire population who wants it. Doesn't have to be flashy, but should be a baseline that private housing should improve on if it wants people to spend their hard earned money to upgrade.

This is why the best form of UBI is a Citizen's Dividend funded through a Land Value Tax. Any increase in rents through the CD just make their way back into higher taxes that then raise the CD.

Ctrl-F "work ethic": the key obstacle is Christian/Protestant work ethic that determines the "worthiness" of welfare/labor through spiritual lens and labels the UBI as undeserving/lazy/idle, creating a moral doctrine of "spiritually purifying work" vs "moral hazard of idleness", which alllows capitalism to exploit people eager to work(noted by Max Weber).

Why don’t fascist regimes push for UBI? Wouldn’t it be in their best interest to pay off the population unless they risk being “demonetised” completely?

Edit: I guess the oil kingdoms in the ME are kinda that

Do you mean democratic regimes?

Fascism tends to reward work rate, contribution, cooperation, etc., and is typically nationalistic - there is no (Western) nation right now without an enormous proportion of ethnic foreigners whereby a UBI would effectively constitute a massive wealth transfer from the domestic population to immigrants (which is, needless to say, contrary to fascist objectives).

This is basically what we are seeing already, democratically, however. I know here in Australia it seems like there are neverending announcements of unfunded public programs to give out money and other resources to whichever group tugs at the voters' heartstrings most effectively. The coffers are dry, national debt is soaring, fraud is rampant, and yet I'm still positive I'll see a feel-good headline next week about the latest government initiative to "pay off" their electorate.

I think they mean fascist, and it's a good question - will the common person toe the line if they get paid to accept it? We almost saw this in the MEFO bill era of the Nazi German economy, where the Wehrmacht's industrial demand reanimated the half-dead German manufacturers. Many poor German citizens got jobs and homes in this era, despite the ongoing tragedy.

Democracy is underpinned by populism, if the average person feels like UBI would harm the economy then they'll vote against it. Fascism, authoritarianism and planned economies can completely skip the public opinion portion and just start paying people out-of-pocket if they're liquid enough. We may see something similar here in the US as Trump considers a public tariff stipend to refute accusations of a recession: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2025/11/19/trump-2000-ta...

Most authoritarian regimes are simply too poor to afford UBI (with the exception of oil as you noted). More generally, prosperity definitely reduces political discontent.

The problem UBI boosters have is not understanding how basic social welfare programs work, or somehow pretending their one weird trick replaces them (that’s why they’re always vague about the actual amount of the UBI).

How do I opt out of a ubi, where I can keep everything I [rightfully] earned?

Move to a place with no government and no services?

There are no places unclaimed by governments. Even if you hide somewhere really remote, eventually an official will emerge from the jungle and deliver the message "you can't be here", and/or a tax bill. Or else it's a war zone, and soldiers will shoot you in the course of deciding who should tax you.

You're asking how you opt out of taxes. You don't.

And everything you earn isn't rightfully yours. It's supported by an infrastructure of national defense, courts, police, building regulations, and so forth. You get many years of public school for free. Etc. etc. You didn't do this solo.

So the cost of all the benefits you get as a citizen is to contribute your rightful share, that share being decided democratically in which you have a vote.

The rightful share is radically lower than it would be set democratically. Taxation above a certain point is a form of oppressive injustice.

Well, obviously that's your opinion as to what constitutes a just, rightful share. But other citizens have different ideas. And in a democracy, a middle ground is found. And that's considered just by democratic principles.

When you pay the government to ensure that its citizens aren’t in desperate poverty you are also getting the service in return where you aren’t getting violently mugged and robbed all the time.

If every American was forced by some kind of mandatory conscription to spend a percentage of their life living in the poorest neighborhoods in America they’d probably become pro-social safety net pretty quick.

Your service sounds like a mafia protection racket.

Congrats, you learned what government is. Next you’ll learn about the Pinkertons.

But this is a real concept. The elite of this world legitimately need pitchfork insurance.

> where I can keep everything I [rightfully] earned?

The same way any animal in the jungle keeps the food they earned.

Return to fish.

Go to a country that don't have UBI? This seems like something that would easily resolve itself. Some countries will have UBI and some won't. If the UBI proponents are right and UBI leads to more human flourishing and a more productive populace, the UBI countries will win out. If the UBI doomers are right that UBI would lead to people getting lazy, the UBI countries will get eclipsed by non-UBI countries.

You haven't "rightfully" earned anything. That's such a loaded thing to say. None of your accomplishments are yours alone. We live in a society.

As impossible, as for me to opt out of your indirectly profiting from my contributions to the economy.

Society is a team effort. That’s what the elections are about.

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