What the Media Isn’t Telling You
What core problems is UBI trying to solve?
The core problems UBI directly seeks to solve are the three pathways it directly impacts: poverty, insecurity, and inequality. Poverty is ultimately a lack of money, and as Dr. King said when he advocated for UBI, “The simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”
But someone not in poverty can still live a very stressful paycheck-to-paycheck existence. A job can be lost at any time. It may not pay enough, even with multiple jobs. Too many are one disaster away from poverty. UBI recognizes prevention as much a part of the answer as treatment. Targeted assistance programs only help after the fact, and the tests they make people go through result in people failing those tests or not taking those tests due to constraints or stigma. Most targeted assistance programs tend to exclude the majority of those they’re intended to help.
They also effectively punish those they help for increasing their incomes. If a floor exists below which no one can ever fall, that’s real security. Finally, even without poverty and with real security, inequality can still exist as its own problem that causes many other problems.
We know UBI works because, consistently, UBI pilots keep showing success after success, especially in saturation site tests where entire communities get it. Increasingly, popular support for UBI will only continue to increase over time.
What contemporary issues have given rise to its increasing adoption/popularity?
Excessive inequality undermines population health. It shortens life expectancy and increases infant and maternal mortality. It corrodes social cohesion by eroding interpersonal trust and civic engagement. It amplifies crime, especially homicide. It fuels mental illness and inflates domestic violence and child abuse. And perhaps most dangerously of all, it heightens political instability and conflict risk.
Because UBI directly reduces inequality, especially when combined with progressive taxes like wealth taxes, all of these problems can to some degree be relieved. A society with no poverty and far less insecurity and inequality is a higher functioning society able to focus on problems and challenges far beyond the problems of day-to-day survival, like for example, how to maintain and grow a democracy instead of losing it to authoritarianism, and how to steward our planetary ecosystem better.
Exacerbating the wealth inequality issue, AI job displacement could cause unemployment rates not seen since the Great Depression, as outlined in the NSF AI Disruption Report.
Why we should all have a basic income?
Consider for a moment that from this day forward, on the first day of every month, around $1,000 is deposited into your bank account—because you are a citizen. This income is independent of every other source of income and guarantees you a monthly starting salary above the poverty line for the rest of your life.
What do you do? Possibly of more importance, what don’t you do? How does this foundation of economic security and positive freedom affect your present and future decisions, from the work you choose to the relationships you maintain, to the risks you take?
The promise of UBI (Universal Basic Income). It’s like social security for all, and it’s taking root within minds around the world and across the entire political spectrum for a multitude of converging reasons. Rising inequality, decades of stagnant wages, the transformation of lifelong careers into sub-hourly tasks, exponentially advancing technology like robots and deep neural networks increasingly capable of replacing potentially half of all human labor, world-changing events like Brexit and the election of Donald Trump—all of these and more are pointing to the need to start permanently guaranteeing everyone at least some income.
Why Retraining is a Mismatch for Algorithmic Displacement
Past economic disruptions, such as the shift from manufacturing, could often be mitigated through federal programs focusing on job retraining. Today, however, we face a disruption fundamentally different in scale and speed. Artificial intelligence is poised to rapidly automate not just repetitive manual tasks, but complex cognitive functions across white-collar professions—jobs that require years of education and experience.
The pace of technological change often renders newly acquired skills obsolete before they can even be utilized. Relying solely on continuous retraining is akin to perpetually asking workers to run faster than the technology itself. UBI provides the necessary economic buffer, allowing individuals to adapt to technological change on their own terms, pursue new forms of contribution, and sustain their families during this epochal transition.