I'm glad you are keeping your mind open. >I think you misunderstand the premise of UBI. UBI is not intended to allow for hyper-consumerism. I was referring to

I'm glad you are keeping your mind open. >I think you misunderstand the premise of UBI. UBI is not intended to allow for hyper-consumerism. I was referring to your argument for redistributive basic income, where you imply that the consumption-boosting impact of basic income would boost economic stability. >What makes you think that the Scandinavian countries have been economically stagnant? GDP and wage growth rates. >I really don't see the US as an example of a massive shift to a social democratic model. The USA has no socialized health care, has no socialized retirement scheme, very limited public education, no socialized child care and certainly no socialized care for the elderly. I could go on, but really; the U.S. of A. is no social democracy. The only accurate points in this paragraph are the US not having universal healthcare or universal socialized childcare. The US has a publicly funded retirement scheme (Social Security) and spends more public money per capita than almost any other country in the world on education. While it lacks universal healthcare, it spends extensively on its public healthcare spending, which covers the elderly, through Medicare, and the poor, through Medicaid. Moreover, social welfare increased 4.8 percent per year on average, between 1972 and 2011 [1]. This represents a massive shift to the social democratic economic model. And it's not just the US. Almost all advanced economies underwent this transition over the last 40 years, and it has been associated with stagnating wage growth and less economic dynamism. [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-driving-growth-in-government-spending/amp/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-driving-growth-...