Universal basic income and what it may look like

[porkpiesinthepark]

I've been thinking for a while about the criticism of UBI and I think it's due to people not being able to imagine the government trying to 'match' peoples wages. In my opinion, it never will but there will be alternatives to what we have now, which will be able to offer something better.

So say the UBI is £1000 a month for a single person.
We could change the housing market to allow much more public housing with rents set at an affordable level, much more stability, no private landlords and the option to customise/ change your home. Let's face it, home ownership is out of reach for the majority at present. I don't find people are dying to own their own homes but desperate to be out of the instability of the private rental market, out of parents houses, out of house shares etc. If you could offer the next best thing to owning your own house, I think people would go for it.
There would be much more community linked to people having extra time due to not working or not working as many hours. Now, not having enough to do in the day is bad but most people have these huge dreams for retirement and this would just allow them to do some of these things now instead. Also more volunteering, looking after elderly relatives etc.
I don't think that private car ownership would be a thing. There would be a big system like Uber who you could call rides on. There would be a cheaper option, say if ten people wanted to go to the city centre at the same time, they would have to walk to a hub and then the van would pick everyone up, like public transport but based on demand. It would be a status symbol to be able to call a car out just for you.
I think a lot more people would wfh getting the cost of transport and childcare down. Schools might even go remote, as there wouldn't be both parents working and so in theory they could help facilitate the lessons. Then teachers would have small classes of Sen kids like mine, key workers and vulnerable children. Kids would interact with others through volunteering groups with parents, or just playing out as there would be less cars and more parents around to keep an eye on them.
People will either hate this vision as it's so different to what we have now. Or they will like some parts. But what we have now can't continue.

I live in East Finchley (the other area where they are trialling UBI) and my mortgage is £1020 for a 2 bed flat. It costs around £1700 to rent my flat privately.

I think it would be really interesting to see the results.

I support UBI but think it needs to be pegged to local costs.

As for the OP's suggestion that there should be more public housing, we could fund it by having a state building company who would sell garden maisonettes and apartments to middle income earners (as well as having a set proportion set aside for lower income earners). The middle income earners would pay 25% below market rate but then they can only sell onto other middle income earners for the next 70 years. There would be income thresholds based on local wages i.e. £120k and below in London, £50k and below in the north.

that would be really fun if it was everyone in east finchley! there is a house down my road (5 bedrooms admittedly) which is now listed at £1.9 million!

Not to mention the people who live in bishops avenue (its mostly empty but i think some of the apartments and houses are occupied). There are also some adjacent roads with higher occupancy rates, and the houses are all in the millions. Its a diverse area but I love living there as i feel like everyone gets along regardless.

Probably end up with a flat rate of income tax. Say 50% of everything earned beyond the UBI?

No they wouldn't, they would cut them. Why pay higher wages when the government is providing enough to live on? Just like tax credits encouraged employers to pay poverty wages.

They’re going to be discussing this on Today’s Politics Live shortly.

If UBI is so great, why did Finland scrap it?

No they wouldn't, they would cut them. Why pay higher wages when the government is providing enough to live on? Just like tax credits encouraged employers to pay poverty wages

What would be the point of anyone getting an education, training and work?

There wouldn’t. That’s the thing. It’s another way to dumb down society and have the plebs known their place. Living in their small worlds, in virtual isolation, relying on handouts, never aspiring to anything, never questioning anything.

When you make people dependent on handouts to survive, they stop asking questions. You take their agency away from them.

@Swrigh1234
This is my total nightmare.
Dumbed down society. Nothing but reality tv on tv. All libraries shut and only rewritten ebooks available. Escape into the meta verse from your poxy box room.
The trajectory is there but surely it won't ever happen 😬

That is a depressing thought

From what I have read, Finland didn't proceed with UBI after it's trial ( still small but larger than the UK 30 people one) as they ended up having to give people with children enhanced payments, extra payments for diability etc so it wasn't a simple fixed sum that everyone got but turned out that the adaptations they ahd to make meant it became rather like their existing benefit system with complicated add ons and decision making.

I read about a trial in India where everyone in a small area ( about 150 adults) were given UBI and it was deemed a success. People were able to buy big bags of rice and lentils in bulk and save money, expand or upgrade their small businesses, send children to school for longer but everything else remained the same such as rent, prices in shops. The problem with UBI is that if everyone in the UK got it then it would inflate house prices and rents yet again as people sought upgrades to their lives, prices of goods could rise and then yet again those at the bottom wouldn't have enough money to live. We don't have total state controlled housing and no one is likely to vote for that.

I agree with @PhoenixArisen tax credits allowed employers to keep wages low knowing the government would top them up (even though it was great families received them). It's always the same the profits of such schemes go to the private sector ( cheap labour) and the costs are socialised ( funded by us sheep)

I think it is well established by now, as other posters have pointed out, that UBI is nothing more than an asset inflation policy. Giving out money for nothing. Remember how that turned out the last time we tried it, only a couple of years ago. It caused rampant inflation that we are still paying for, even now.

There is no such thing as free money. It is either earned through trade between nations, printed or borrowed. The latter two are deadly. If you pay people to sit there and give them money for nothing, you devalue money. That is inflation. And where does it all flow into? Assets. You can bet your bottom dollar, pardon the pun, that the majority of UBI recipients will not be owning any assets in the future, sitting there all day like cabbages watching TikTok, waiting for their next payment. Assets will be further consolidated into the hands of the ever decreasing minority.

Did we learn nothing from 2008 or Covid? It literally happened right in front of our very eyes. Based on the naïveté of UBI proponents on this thread, seems not.

Why pay higher wages... um... because if you don't, few will bother working for you.

When the benefit is NOT tied to how much you work/how much you earn... like WTC, then yes, they'd have to offer higher wages/more flexible hours/other employee benefits.

I am not sure on exactly how you'd calculate the amounts - where you live, disability/illness etc all affects how much life costs.

I do think we would still need a way of assessing the sick/disabled, because life does cost more and I don't see that changing with a UBI.

However with the massive saving in not forcing people into work, not means testing absolutely everything, and the major attitude shift UBI would require, an assessment system designed to fairly assess peoples needs rather than deny peoples needs shouldn't be so bad.

We'd also have far fewer people off sick with stress and the chronic illnesses caused by it, which costs employers and government a fortune!

Children though... no i dont think they should get you extra. Perhaps every birth gets a 'new baby' pack but then addition of a child does not get anything extra until the child turns 16. So the decision to have children is not influenced by an extra household income.

Everyone would need their own bank account, I can see nasty abusive partners taking their partners UBI... but then that sort of financial abuse happens now anyway. Managed correctly it could make it much easier for people to leave an abusive partner!

It would be a miserable existence with no aspirations or opportunities in life. This has already been tried in communist countries! If we have no access to owning resources then we have no control of our lives.

85% of Singaporeans live in public housing i.e. flats they buy from the government at subsidised rates. Most Singaporeans don't own cars, you have to pay the equivalent of £50k to buy a certificate to own a car so its ride sharing apps and taxis and public transport for most people.

Its very far from communist; in fact 1 in 6 singaporean households. are US dollar millionaires. Having strong state regulated alternatives doesn't make life worse, in fact it can mean the private sector is forced to offer a premium option. In Singapore, all the private condos have swimming pools and gyms as a default as there needs to be something to differentiate them from the government flats and the houses are all at least 2000 square feet (double the size of the average uk home)- this is because government flats are normally 1000 square feet (built for families) so if you are trying to persuade people to pay a premium to buy houses, then it needs to be significantly bigger.

As for UBI, it needs to be carefully thought through. It could be that we have no alternative due to mass unemployment due to AI. Also the middle class is shrinking so it may be that most people would qualify for in work benefits by default (so this is just the nice term for in work benefits). I just discovered over the weekend that DH and I have been upgraded to Barclays Premier Banking (because DH's salary raise and bonus has meant he earns £75k). DH considers us to have low incomes (for london standards) and indeed in a city where NQ lawyers at top firms earn £100k and a 22 year old analyst at any of the banks or tech firms earns 50k, our incomes are nothing to shout about for a 31 year old and 33 year old.

The fact that Barclays (as well as HSBC and Natwest) have yet to upgrade their income criteria for a decade means that their customer base (whole of the UK, not just London financial sector) have yet to increase their incomes in an age of increasing inflation. This means that if this doesn't improve, most people would be poor by default and they would be qualifying for top up benefits (in order to eat) but i think most people would find it quite demeaning so maybe its better to call it UBI. for the shrinking percentage of the population who would be earning a living wage based solely on labour, you could easily get them to pay taxes on it or place thresholds. But at least the majority of people would retain their dignity which is important for mental health.

Limit savings and have excessive access to your personal information.

In a country with no guns and police who don't attend burglary, it's not going to be weak people holding resources.

Did you factor in AI?

AI will do the highbrow jobs leaving humans tonight out manual Labour type jobs that a robot Hoover can't do.

despite the fact that automated car wash is not very sophisticated technology (and has existed even when I was a kid in the 1990s), there are still lots of car wash businesses where their modus operandi is still 'man with rag and pail'. This presumably is because labour is cheap.

It was found that Uber didn't eliminate driving as a profession, in fact it increased the number of drivers on the road. It also reduced their wages by an average of 10%. There are still black cab drivers in London to this day, they just don't earn as much as they used to in relative terms. Another example is translators- even with Google Translate and Chatgpt, we would still need translators but they would still be paid less. The ones who can create synergy between their knowledge and AI would be able to earn better than their counterparts who can't

The reading for it did include advances in technology, was from 2006 tho so not AI as we know it today. Also the labour market was different, Amazon, mass warehouses etc were not really discussed but the low paid, low valued work mentioned were mainly domestic work and factory work. There are probably more recent readings available but probably have to wait a year or two for peer reviewed stuff for a UBI/AI paper specifically.

Transhuman and AI is a massive topic in philosophy tho, suspect that plenty of academics in the future will earn massive £££ advising on this.

Without ownership of assets, people have no status. This is psychologically harmful.
If it was fine, we'd all quit our jobs in this country and live off benefits.
No one wants to just survive.

(@SapatSea I can't take credit for that comment. It was @DdraigGoch who mentioned tax credits)

socialmedia23 - but UBI is not replicating Singapore here. A UBI scheme is where you get a fixed amount of money regardless whether you work or not (a social convention rather than an economic necessity, see Capital by Karl Marx). You certainly will not be a USD millionaire on 1.6k a month!

Please note UBI is sold to us not only as an answer to poverty but also to joblessness due to AI and (reading between the lines) climate change restrictions!

£1000 a month? But that's a massive drop in income to most.
What about the drop in living standards for those of us who have worked hard to have that extra income?
What? The work just disappears?
How do all of these affordable homes just magically appear?

Sounds impossible to implement, and I for one wouldn't want it.

well the original OP did mention state housing and lower car ownership as OP's vision of the future so i thought you were disagreeing with that.

I believe UBI would not be able to cover people's wants and needs so people will work to afford the extras. That has always been the case.

What UBI is good for is that it would allow people to study full time as an adult or start a business - both of which would enhance's one's earnings in the long term. Many people can't do that now as they have to pay the rent and bills and so are trapped in a cycle of poverty.

I mean like a PP we could all quit our jobs and live on benefits. However, most of us don't do that. As people tend to want to afford holidays, to do nice things during the weekends, to be able to live good lives.

When you work in a job, its not just for the current salary, its also the prospect of progression. Most people don't earn the big bucks in their first job, it can take time. But you need the first job.