It’s really very simple: at our current stage of technological evolution, if everyone stops working, we all die.
It’s important to remember that there is a massive difference between adopting a UBI in a large welfare state like Finland as opposed to eg the US.
For a small UBI it’s effectively just a matter of first moving many different systems into a single one.
When I was a student I was paid $600/mo or thereabouts to study.
Now I’m a well paid dev and parent. We get a child grant for two kids of $300/mo and a daycare subsidy of around $2k per month for the two of them.
Those child grants/subsidies require no application or qualification. Obviously under a UBI a lot of that would be shifted into the UBI instead so instead of using subsidized daycare people would choose not to work for a while.
So I think it’s entirely possible for some of the Nordic welfare states to change to a UBI-like system. The payout might not be a living wage (as in this experiment) but it could replace student grants, minimum unemployment benefits, minimum pensions, daycare subsidy etc. For full time workers it would just be a huge tax credit (probably offset by an even larger tax hike)
Meanwhile I think it would be extremely hard for the US to do the same, because UBI without the intermediate step of a massive welfare state just isn’t going to be easy.
There are a number of competing effects, but at least one currently unanswered question about basic income is whether people are naturally lazy or naturally entrepreneurial. I.e. given an unshakeable safety net which means they are ok whatever they do, do people work harder to do better than ok, or sit on ok. There have only been unsatisfactory trials so far, but a number of results seem to favour the better result.
Here's another way of looking at it. Currently, people can get sucked into a benefit trap. They might have an income from benefits of £100 a week, which vanishes once they start work. So obviously they would lose out unless a job they can get provides at least £100 + travel and other costs. Basic income removes this trap by saying: "You get £100 always. But you also get to keep a large proportion of every pound you earn above £100. Go for it!
Under basic income, a person otherwise on benefits can walk round people's houses with a ladder and offer to clean windows - and gain from the process.
hm, interesting. I tend to have an opposite view - if we all start working just one day a week, everything will be just fine.