UBI might work in the short-term, but as more and more people are having kids (and learning from parents on UBI, to also get UBI), we would run out of people actually working and paying the taxes to support it.
People get bored doing nothing, and enjoy contributing to their community.
No, they're not going to go get shitty factory jobs. But that's OK, because all those jobs are now automated and done by robots.
But they are going to go and do something useful, because that's what people do. The anti-UBI trope that "given basic income, everyone will just sit around on their arses watching TikTok videos" has been proven wrong in every study that measured it.
You can replace coal mines above with a million other things, I chose a dramatic, niche example.
The fact is that in recorded history, there have been almost no instances of economic setups without the downtrodden. I like efforts like UBI being made to address that, but it is important to address the fact that UBI itself is not the final solution. It is still possible that we reach a working solution eventually(who knows when?) by exploring things like UBI though. A lot of online discourse simply lies in a narrow band of "UBI = communism which didn't work in the specific instance of the soviet union" and on the other side "opposing UBI = oligarch".
And that in turn, would drive the economics of building robots to replace the people because the people are so expensive.
- $UNPLEASANT_JOB is costing too much! Let us start making robots
- Let us continue to bear the cost of paying $UNPLEASANT_JOB a high wage for the decade+ it takes to develop the automation for that task.
Nope, here is what will happen:
- $UNPLEASANT_JOB is costing too much! Let us figure out how to automate this task. In the meanwhile, let us dump the wages for this role. Otherwise, our company closes down.
- 10-15 years later, the same automation needs to be cheaper than the dumped wage for it to be feasible, which is a completely different challenge. First of all, the automation has to be cheaper than your "high enough wage", which is more than you can say for robotics products today.
We've seen this play out before. We know how this goes.
But I agree UBI is not the final solution. The final solution involves stuff like abolishing wage labor, circular economies, non-transferable labor-time tokens and democractic management.