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I am concerned that UBI as a whole will make the divorce between economy and productivity, just like artificial pumping by the government divorces stock market

I am concerned that UBI as a whole will make the divorce between economy and productivity, just like artificial pumping by the government divorces stock market from the economy. An individual will have this illusion of they are fine in life, as long as UBI coming in, even though they are not productive at all. Stability of a government is never guaranteed. What if one day, for whatever reason, whether the government go rogue, or the government has no more money or assets, decide to stop UBI. A lot of people will suddenly be unprepared to come to terms with the actual reality, that they don't have the needed marketable skills to survive in the world because they have been living off UBI all these times without cultivating themselves.

leoedin 6y ago
That's only the case if most people are happy sitting back and living off UBI. That's not a given. I've known people who inherited reasonable sums of money - enough to live a frugal life for a decade or so. None of them have quit their jobs and lived frugally for a decade. What that money has allowed is security. It's allowed them to take career risks, or go back to university and retrain. That's obviously anecdotal - my network skews educated and career driven to start with. It would be interesting to know how many people would just sit back and do nothing. It would also be interesting to know how inflationary the effect of everyone having that UBI would be - so much of the value of money comes from its relative scarcity, so maybe we'd find that if everyone has a basic income then the threshold for security just goes up. I'm not sure how we'd establish that without trying it though.
ksdale 6y ago
I agree with you completely that it's a problem when society as a whole doesn't have a good idea of what it means to be "productive" but I think that in your second sentence, you could just as easily replace "UBI" with "wages" and the truthfulness of it doesn't change at all. I think working for wages doesn't allow most people to do what I would consider "cultivating themselves," and possessing "marketable" skills is not the same thing as possessing useful skills. Obviously we all have our own definitions of "productive" (I actually like to think of it more as useful rather than profitable) but my own personal opinion is that what is useful and what people get paid for have as little overlap as they've ever had, so the risk of replacing certain jobs with UBI isn't actually as much of a threat to productivity as it might seem like.

leoedin 6y ago

That's only the case if most people are happy sitting back and living off UBI. That's not a given. I've known people who inherited reasonable sums of money - enough to live a frugal life for a decade or so. None of them have quit their jobs and lived frugally for a decade. What that money has allowed is security. It's allowed them to take career risks, or go back to university and retrain. That's obviously anecdotal - my network skews educated and career driven to start with. It would be interesting to know how many people would just sit back and do nothing. It would also be interesting to know how inflationary the effect of everyone having that UBI would be - so much of the value of money comes from its relative scarcity, so maybe we'd find that if everyone has a basic income then the threshold for security just goes up. I'm not sure how we'd establish that without trying it though.

ksdale 6y ago

I agree with you completely that it's a problem when society as a whole doesn't have a good idea of what it means to be "productive" but I think that in your second sentence, you could just as easily replace "UBI" with "wages" and the truthfulness of it doesn't change at all. I think working for wages doesn't allow most people to do what I would consider "cultivating themselves," and possessing "marketable" skills is not the same thing as possessing useful skills. Obviously we all have our own definitions of "productive" (I actually like to think of it more as useful rather than profitable) but my own personal opinion is that what is useful and what people get paid for have as little overlap as they've ever had, so the risk of replacing certain jobs with UBI isn't actually as much of a threat to productivity as it might seem like.