I bet that it did not have a benefit. Giving money away without a stated goal leads nowhere. The idea of basic income will only work if the receivers are helped along to define what their goal in life will be. Most people have no clue as to what they want out of life. Giving people free money will only make things worse since now they lose the incentive to even try. At least when you have a job you work towards completing someone else's goal. With a basic income, you have no defined goal and you lose the stress of having to find one.
People are talking about mass unemployment because of AI, something that will cause societal chaos, so I can understand why governments and the elite would want to push for a basic income. But it needs to be done in a way that will not destroy people's incentive to help society.
We don't always see it but the only reason we have and are able to buy what we need is because someone got up and did a day's worth of work. Imagine a future where everyone has a choice of showing up to work. Some people will always show up, some people will never show up but the vast majority will show up depending on how they feel that day. A recipe for a chaotic society.
The finnish ubi thing was a joke because it's not nation wide and the amount paid is marginal. I don't see how you can glean any relevant info from that. Wonder what the ramifications are going to be if you're going to see stories of failures connected to not-so-good UBI studies and how they're going to be played by politicians or people against UBI?
>Most people have no clue as to what they want out of life. Giving people free money will only make things worse since now they lose the incentive to even try. At least when you have a job you work towards completing someone else's goal. With a basic income, you have no defined goal and you lose the stress of having to find one. [...] it needs to be done in a way that will not destroy people's incentive to help society.
This part seems more legit. What is the goal in life? Enjoyment of sense pleasure? Procreation? Creation of works of art? I don't know if the point of life can be slaving away roughly third of your waking hours to fuel a gigantic machine based on pointless consumption of material goods and the 'latest shit'. Then again, I also don't know why we need 7 or 11 billion humans on this planet doing those things and how it's going to be sustainable if more and more jobs are being automated away and more and more people are still supposedly going to be lifted from real third world poverty into low/middle consumer class. No doubt on balance everyone should try to be a force of goodness in this world, right?
>Imagine a future where everyone has a choice of showing up to work. Some people will always show up, some people will never show up but the vast majority will show up depending on how they feel that day. A recipe for a chaotic society.
I think this is a false comparison. The owner/manager class and employers no doubt are against ubi because it cuts into their power over others. In my opinion the main benefit of UBI is 'strongarming' employers to having to treat workers better because everyone gets paid enough to move on to greener pastures if they find their jobs paying too little compared to how they are treated or how they enjoy their jobs, allowing people from all walks of life no matter their starting position to be more mobile in society.
With UBI you would get paid more the more you worked and that's an incentive enough. Some people no doubt will cut back their hours or drop out of life with a bong in their hand but that's on them.
How does the economy work anyway? Money has purchasing power somehow correlated to the amount of effort people put into work and the cost of items and services usually reflect a value of time and effort? Won't UBI simply shift some of the ginormous cumulative pareto distorted amount the top whatever% get for simply being at the top to the ordinary folks in the form of a safety net? Productivity seems to be increasing throughout the history yet somehow and arguably perhaps rightly they go to the owners and managers.
In a democratic society we can wrestle some of it back because everyone's in this together like it or not and UBI could make for a fairer and less cut throat society.
People are talking about mass unemployment because of AI, something that will cause societal chaos, so I can understand why governments and the elite would want to push for a basic income. But it needs to be done in a way that will not destroy people's incentive to help society.
We don't always see it but the only reason we have and are able to buy what we need is because someone got up and did a day's worth of work. Imagine a future where everyone has a choice of showing up to work. Some people will always show up, some people will never show up but the vast majority will show up depending on how they feel that day. A recipe for a chaotic society.