> But I don't understand why people don't believe the UBI will just become the new definition of poverty. People will still be miserable and feel like they have nothing when comparing themselves to those who get UBI and have a job.
We don't know that people will 'still be miserable', let alone the ratio of misery in the current versus the proposed economy. My expectation is that fewer people will be in poverty / misery, but that's just as speculative as your opinion.
In any case, it's not cause to avoid considering a UBI. We should not be constraining our goals to a perfect first attempt [1] - merely to obtain some improvement over the current arrangement.
I agree with the notion of not waiting for a perfect plan, and for moving forward to improve the current situation. I consider myself "progressive" in that way.
But if I was writing some code and there was a problem in my algorithm where some people had nothing and some people had too much, I would just take some from the top and give it to the bottom. The UBI seems like a re-writing from scratch.
The troubles with that approach are that a) we've tried it, and it doesn't work very well, b) it's complex - how much is 'too much', how much do you 'take from the top', and how much do you 'give to the bottom', and c) it's expensive to administer, because a lot of time it spent working out the numbers and scheduling (and monitoring to prevent fraud) involved in the (b) bit.
We don't know that people will 'still be miserable', let alone the ratio of misery in the current versus the proposed economy. My expectation is that fewer people will be in poverty / misery, but that's just as speculative as your opinion.
In any case, it's not cause to avoid considering a UBI. We should not be constraining our goals to a perfect first attempt [1] - merely to obtain some improvement over the current arrangement.
[1] https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...