this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023
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Okay, I'll put it in simpler terms: when governments implement unsustainable policies, it is the working class that ultimately pays the price. Just look at history.
And when governments ignore the economic needs of everyone except the rich for too long, the result tends to be violence. The US is perilously close to that now, and we're not doing much better. D'you really want a revolution, with all the blood-in-the-streets nastiness that entails? We need to change the game somehow, and UBI is one way of doing it. Not the only way, granted, but the political will doesn't seem to be there for any of the others either.
Only at extremes far beyond of what we are seeing today. Other places in the world have substantially larger Gini coefficients and that hasn't translated into violence.
What basis do you have to assert that?
A false dichotomy.
You are assuming that a UBI would be beneficial to the working class. I have presented multiple reasons why that is questionable, and you haven't addressed any one of them.
That's because your individual points all derive from focusing on the wrong things.
What people want is prosperity—the sense of flourishing and being successful at life. Unfortunately, that's very difficult to measure, because definitions of "success" are idiosyncratic and widely variable. So we measure money as a proxy for prosperity. The problem is, it's a very bad proxy, one that can actually pull in the opposite direction of the thing it's supposed to be a proxy for. Which is what appears to be happening here.
You're trying to look at this from the point of view of macroeconomics, which is the study of large-scale money flows. Money flows. Except that programs like UBI are not designed to optimise money flows, they're an attempt to improve median prosperity, even if that results in poorer mean financial outcomes.
I admit my previous post was a bit on the hyperbolic side, but you're treating this as though the situation were a case study in an economics class. Which it isn't.