you say it like thats a bad thing
I don't personally advocate for UBI, but I'll counter your question with another question; how are individuals supposed to have class mobility in an economy where the majority of transactions are speculative? The traditional "work hard and retire eventually" mindset is not going to last forever.
It's not only recent, according to this quote from 300 years ago.
Jonathan Swift — 'It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.'
The way he did it was to preach their cult's doctrine to them. "OK, according to your church's teaching, here's the requirements for you to be saved. How are you doing? Are you going to make it? How much harder are you going to have to work in order to make it? Will even working harder be enough to get you there?" When the weight of what their belief system actually demanded of them sunk in, some of them didn't want to be in the cult anymore.
Some of them. A few. Not many. But some.
I'm not familiar with the details of these experiments but the first thing that strikes me is that this cannot be experimentally tested without guaranteeing participants a lifetime of UBI. They don't drop out of the labor force because they know it's temporary.
You wouldn't quit your job if you're only promised 2 years of UBI, because the cost that resigning has upon your future employability may be greater than the money from the UBI experiment. Or if you did quit, it would be to make a gambit (such as going back into schooling or training) that will leave you better off once the experiment is over.
The only reliable experiment design would be putting a few million per participant into some guaranteed annuities fund.
That isn’t behavior that occurred in the pilot problems they talk about it.
It will take 15 or 20 years before any UBI could be considered permanent enough for a majority of people to change their work habits.
I do believe that people would still work though. Personally I would like to do a useful job with real benefit to society, but the low pay makes it not feasible. I would still want to work part time at least instead of not at all.
Not to mention that most people enjoy working as it gives them a sense of purpose.
Barring AGI and a swarm of drones/nanobots, you still need people to work. Money is just a unit of exchange. If everyone on earth has a billion dollars, but nobody wants to work, nobody is going to be driving around in lambos.
Utopia or dystopia? Probably both, unevenly distributed
Edit: I guess the oil kingdoms in the ME are kinda that
Fascism tends to reward work rate, contribution, cooperation, etc., and is typically nationalistic - there is no (Western) nation right now without an enormous proportion of ethnic foreigners whereby a UBI would effectively constitute a massive wealth transfer from the domestic population to immigrants (which is, needless to say, contrary to fascist objectives).
This is basically what we are seeing already, democratically, however. I know here in Australia it seems like there are neverending announcements of unfunded public programs to give out money and other resources to whichever group tugs at the voters' heartstrings most effectively. The coffers are dry, national debt is soaring, fraud is rampant, and yet I'm still positive I'll see a feel-good headline next week about the latest government initiative to "pay off" their electorate.
Democracy is underpinned by populism, if the average person feels like UBI would harm the economy then they'll vote against it. Fascism, authoritarianism and planned economies can completely skip the public opinion portion and just start paying people out-of-pocket if they're liquid enough. We may see something similar here in the US as Trump considers a public tariff stipend to refute accusations of a recession: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2025/11/19/trump-2000-ta...
I'm interested in answers that mostly preserve the status quo, and in answers that propose more radical shifts.
Any kind of a universal safety net would allow human civilization as a whole to chill out a bit, and could also reduce various petty scams and/or the damage they cause to people.
Giving all 258 million adult US citizens $1000 a month totals to $3.096 trillion per year.
Giving them all $2000 a month totals to $6.192 trillion per year - more than all US tax revenue from all sources combined.
Of course, we already have a $1.7 trillion deficit, with $38 trillion and counting in debt without the UBI, and I assume you're not planning on defaulting on our $1 trillion+ in annual interest payments on the debt either, right?
How about Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which by themselves take up over half of the entire federal budget, are we keeping those too?
If you'd like, we could confiscate 100% of the assets of every billionaire that's a US citizen and hope to sell all of the non-liquid asssets at market prices, that'll get us 9 months worth of current federal spending levels - less if we're adding UBI on top and not getting rid of any other programs.
Now if you want to get creative, we could keep funding the military and use it to go after all of the other global billionaires, that'll get us almost through a full 4-year presidential cycle, at the low, low cost of invading just about every other sovereign nation on earth to rob their citizens, too.
We could also have the treasury start minting trillion dollar coins to both pay off the debt and fund the UBI, but I don't think you're going to like your $2000 monthly UBI check as much when market rent on a studio is $200,000 a month.
If you have better ideas on how to pay for this, I'm all ears.
Landlords and other oligopolistic goods-sellers with a lot of leverage and cartel-like dynamics can now count on a base income for everyone. I don’t see how low income housing doesn’t instantly becomes more expensive across the board, with profits funneled to established landlords.
At least with SNAP/EBT, your landlord can’t take that money.
UBI is sold as a cheap program to run because it eliminates the application and verification processes involved with existing benefits programs. But those same concepts could be applied to existing programs.
Other pro-worker reforms could also replace the whole UBI idea, where UBI just feels like a band-aid for a society with worsening income inequality and increasing corporate control. It has a “fix the symptom” vibe.
Literally 100% of them will raise the rent and there won’t be anything anyone can do about it.
In theory, having more capital available in the face of a landlord raising rent an obnoxious amount will incentivize people who aren't making much to move somewhere with a lower CoL that they might not have been able to make work otherwise because of uncertainty in the amount of time they'd be out of work or their base level of money available for that time.
You think people don't pay their rent with SNAP/EBT?
I've got news for you - they do, by selling their benefits to someone with cash at a horrible rate. To pay rent, put gas in their cars, buy alcohol... all the things money is necessary for.
And everything you earn isn't rightfully yours. It's supported by an infrastructure of national defense, courts, police, building regulations, and so forth. You get many years of public school for free. Etc. etc. You didn't do this solo.
So the cost of all the benefits you get as a citizen is to contribute your rightful share, that share being decided democratically in which you have a vote.
Society is a team effort. That’s what the elections are about.
The same way any animal in the jungle keeps the food they earned.
If every American was forced by some kind of mandatory conscription to spend a percentage of their life living in the poorest neighborhoods in America they’d probably become pro-social safety net pretty quick.
But this is a real concept. The elite of this world legitimately need pitchfork insurance.