Very interesting. Some actual data to go with all the political bluster surrounding the idea of a Universal Basic Income.
There is a lot of data out there in the US, they’re trying it in a lot of places.
curious where Alaska’s pfd falls on the scale, or if it isn’t counted because it isn’t consistent or part of a controlled study.
Every single UBI experiment has the same results, it’s wildly successful. The only reason it will never happen for most of humanity is capitalism.
The only reason the rich cunts try to tell us you ‘can’t just GIVE people free money’ is because they want all the free money for themselves.
There are two kinds of peer reviewed research I like. 1. The amazing wild nobody ever expected it sort of results that upset multiple fields of research. And 2. The gradual, incremental improvements of what we already thought, but now with even better data. The former is uncommon and exciting; the latter merely extends the sphere of knowledge in expected ways. This clearly falls into category #2, so Yay!
Every UBI study shows how successful the idea is, but it’s ultimately a bad system, because all it will ever be is another form of Capitalism. What makes UBI successful is that people no longer have to struggle (as much) to pay rent and feed themselves while pursuing more worthy endeavors. If you read between the lines of every UBI success story, you find that money is just a middle man, an unnecessary toll booth between people and progress.
The real solution here is to guarantee a standard of living to people that includes housing, food, education and healthcare, without involving the exchange of money at all, because as long as these things are commodified, Capitalism will always find a way to provide as little of them as possible while charging as much as possible for them.
I think the arena that a healthy capitalism excels at, is the creation and distribution of luxuries. Capitalism should solely be used for that aspect in a economic system, but society must provide all necessities by default. This would allow us to benefit from the good parts of capitalism, while preventing it from metastasizing into a cancer.
“Healthy capitalism” is an oxymoron. It’s like saying “healthy cancer.” Capitalism has only existed for a few hundred years, like 2 or 3, but people have been making art and luxuries for tens of thousands of years.
Cancer is what happens when cells no longer have a mechanism to keep them from unchecked multiplication. We all need cells, but only in a effective quantity. The same applies to the assorted parts that make up capitalism.
I think that rejecting all of capitalism is a bad idea. Instead, the issues with capitalism and other systems should be identified, then have a designed arrangement to prevent those problems from developing.
I think the problem is that there are finite resources, so under any kind of UBI like system you still need a way to track and limit the number of resources one person can recieve to ensure everyone gets a fair share, the most convenient way is some kind of monthly allotment of tokens which are inevitably money.
I think the Universal Ranked Income concept that I outlined elsewhere in the thread would address this. I think most people would find generic goods to be very boring, thus they would be compelled to obtain money to buy something a bit more fancy. This would let us leverage the stuff capitalism is good at, namely the creation and distribution of products. So long as capitalism is never allowed to dictate a person’s wellbeing, I think it can be used to optimize society’s expenditure on resources.
