[mhuffman]

I believe that after enough automation, UBI (or at least BI) will have to manifest in "first-world" countries. Starvation will be the alternative. I also believe that when the sample size get big enough, there will be people that just live off of the UBI and do nothing else, and those will be easy to find and easy to politicize. So that the overbearing control of how people spend the money will come into play. You already see this with EBT.

There have not been many large-scale/long-run UBI pilot projects so there is not a lot of real evidence on what will happen. The Canadian experiment (mincome) from around 50 years ago is the main one that people reference and it has plenty of problems regarding scientific rigor and design. There are many other shorter and smaller ones from all over the world and different places within the US with mixed results. Many of them, if you look into them, have the problem where the politics of it will often conflict with (and usually overcome) any scientific rigor.

There are also many UBI alternatives, not just the "send everyone a check every month" varieties. Nearly all of them have some common sense reasonableness to them, but it is very, very expensive to really try and very hard to justify to many people to "just give" their tax money to other people for free without any qualifications.

[deadlast2]

Sort of feel that this is already done on the reservations in Canada. I don't think it works well.