UBI has a lot of interesting arguments for it. However, I have a concern about UBI in practice that I have not seen addressed. It seems likely to me that politicians will adjust the UBI amount erratically, leading to disruptions. Today, this happens with minimum wage laws. Often the minimum wage is not raised for long stretches of time and then in other states the minimum wage is increased to levels that are probably not economically justifiable. Likewise, what happens if the UBI is not increased adequately and suddenly a large pool of people find themselves unable to meet their basic needs on it? Or if the UBI is increased too much and workers drop out of the labor market en masse as the UBI now provides more than their basic needs?
The easiest comparison is probably not with minimum wages but with welfare relief e.g. food stamps, which is not changed all that often. Anyway, our first experiments with UBI will probably see more frequent changes as we figure out whether the system can work in the long term, but hopefully we’ll end up just indexing it to the cost of basic necessities, adjusted for some measure of unskilled wages—after all, you don’t need UBI if The Donald manages to bring all manufacturing jobs back to America, and factory work becomes as plentiful and high-paying as in the 1950s and 1960s!
UBI has a lot of interesting arguments for it. However, I have a concern about UBI in practice that I have not seen addressed. It seems likely to me that politicians will adjust the UBI amount erratically, leading to disruptions. Today, this happens with minimum wage laws. Often the minimum wage is not raised for long stretches of time and then in other states the minimum wage is increased to levels that are probably not economically justifiable. Likewise, what happens if the UBI is not increased adequately and suddenly a large pool of people find themselves unable to meet their basic needs on it? Or if the UBI is increased too much and workers drop out of the labor market en masse as the UBI now provides more than their basic needs?
The easiest comparison is probably not with minimum wages but with welfare relief e.g. food stamps, which is not changed all that often. Anyway, our first experiments with UBI will probably see more frequent changes as we figure out whether the system can work in the long term, but hopefully we’ll end up just indexing it to the cost of basic necessities, adjusted for some measure of unskilled wages—after all, you don’t need UBI if The Donald manages to bring all manufacturing jobs back to America, and factory work becomes as plentiful and high-paying as in the 1950s and 1960s!