3 Reasons For Universal Basic Income

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is one of the most hotly debated topics in modern politics. There are several kinds of UBIs. Broadly speaking, there’s the kind of UBI where people are paid unconditionally in regular intervals such as monthly payments, and there’s the kind of UBI where people are paid a one-off equal (per person) sum of capital or equity or estate at the beginning of their adulthood. There are also variants of UBI that switch out the ‘unconditional’ part with ‘strings-attached’. Regardless of whichever form we consider, here are 3 reasons why the concept of UBI should at least be considered seriously.

What Exists In The Absence of UBI?

That’s an interesting question. Well, the answer is our present reality.

Let’s take a finer look at our present reality. Every human being has the so called basic needs: food, shelter, and health care. As far as modern western societies are concerned, food is an individual venture. But shelter and health care are pretty much enforced entities. In other words, social regulation requires that each person has a registered residential address, and is subscribed to a health care system of some sort. The residential address requirement in turn leads to further bindings such as electricity bill, water tax, and so on. The health care system requires that each individual is at least insured in some way. All of these bindings cost money. On the contrary, let’s take some random wild creature, like a random wolf living in a random wolf pack in some random forest. The wolf does not owe anybody anything in order to just exist. Mind you, wolves are social creatures just like us.

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Since we are more sophisticated creatures, our social systems are significantly sophisticated, and this involves money. But the downside of this systemic implementation is that by default, every individual in our society owes something to somebody just in order to exist. In other words, what exists in the absence of UBI is not a neutral scenario where one is a free born soul, but UBD – Universal Basic Debt (cue in rent, health insurance, water tax, electricity bill, etc.). So this begs the question: why not push the balance a notch toward the neutral side? Could UBI be a potential tool to solve this challenge?

Decoupling Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and Poverty

The army is usually a desperate employer, especially during these times of peace. Taking one of the top western countries for sampling, the US Army has placed a minimum IQ requirement of 81 in its selection criteria. This means that if a person has an IQ lower than 81, he or she will be rejected by the US army. To put things in perspective, this represents roughly 10 percent of the population (considering a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15). The US population is estimated to be 332.5 million as of the date of writing this article. That means that 33.25 million US citizens are not even eligible to apply for the army. If they are not eligible for the army, they are likely not attractive for other employers either. Automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are not making things any easier. This situation drives this segment of the population more and more towards poverty, unfortunately because of IQ related reasons that are beyond their control. What is our collective responsibility in resolving this situation? Of course, UBI is not a silver bullet that is going to solve every challenge here. But could UBI be at least considered as part of a potentially prospective solution for this scenario?

Is Slowing Down Innovation An Option?

Machine Learning (ML) algorithms have already made a few fields like that of the radiologists’ redundant, because they are simply orders of magnitude better their human counterparts. Further advancements are made in other fields, such as with autonomous driving. One of the ‘easier to solve’ sub-fields targeted by autonomous driving is the truck driving industry, since in most developed nations, trucking involves its own lanes, and the rules are fairly well defined. If this segment is successfully automated by AI, there would be millions of truck drivers (mostly men, statistically speaking) who would be made redundant. The natural role of responsible regulators would be step in here, and fight for the jobs of today’s truck drivers. One could argue that this kind of a push-and-pull would lead to inefficient slowing down of technological innovation.

If we can already foresee such a scenario coming ahead in the future, could we do something to help avoid the situation or handle it more efficiently? Why wait until the problem starts to hurt? Could UBI be a viable tool in solving this potential situation in the future?

Conclusion

We have not covered typical disadvantages of UBI here, such as the incentivisation of lethargy, immoral gaming of the system, the challenges in sourcing the funding for such a system, long term effects on consumption and inflation, etc. Similarly, we also have not considered all of the potential reasons to consider UBI as a viable solution. This article is not meant to be exhaustive in its reasoning. Instead, the aim here has been to propose considering UBI as a serious alternative, so that there can at least be a reasonable discussion that takes place. Once we have an active discussion going on in sufficient sub-localities and forums, innovative ideas are likely to show up that aim at solving the long term socio-systemic challenges we are facing, and are about to face because of our rapid technological advancements.

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