The Fatal Trap UBI Boosters Keep Falling Into
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu20 points by haritha-j 3 hours ago
20 points by haritha-j 3 hours ago
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.
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.
>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.'
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.
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.
What happens if nobody works and how will we afford it are absolutely valid questions. A sovereign fund might answer both
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
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
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
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.
How about a "pseudo UBI" that only pays for basic necessities like rent, utilities, groceries and basic healthcare?
Any kind of safety net would let human civilization as a whole 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.
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...
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.
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”.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
How do I opt out of a ubi, where I can keep everything I [rightfully] earned?
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.
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.
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.
> where I can keep everything I [rightfully] earned?
The same way any animal in the jungle keeps the food they earned.
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.
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).