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The central flaws of universal basic income
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AT its most simple universal basic income (UBI) is a government programme in which every adult citizen receives a set amount of money on a regular, unconditional basis. The current range of proposals are probably best understood as a patchwork of possibilities rather than a single idea or policy, but it’s basically about giving money to solve social and economic problems.
UBI has a specious appeal and its advocates sometimes speak of it as the catholicon that will save capitalism from itself. However, some of the problems are signalled by its own advocates.
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future, write that UBI’s establishment would allow workers to have “the option to choose whether to take a job or not (but)... if the payment isn’t high enough to let people to refuse work, UBI might push wages down and create more ‘bullshit jobs.’”
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