[yorwba]

If you make the "basic pod" a tent, wealthy countries could probably afford this sci-fi future today. But "enough money to live like a homeless person without having to beg or steal" doesn't sound so great as an aspirational goal, does it?

If the "basic pod" is supposed to be something more durable, probably the first step would have to be building enough homeless shelters for all the UBI recipients without another source of income.

[gruez]

>If you make the "basic pod" a tent, wealthy countries could probably afford this sci-fi future today.

Don't you also need food?

[yorwba]

Yes, I'm saying that wealthy countries can definitely afford the "basic food" part of the "live in your basic pod and eat basic food" future, but the "basic pods" are more uncertain. If there's not enough money to build enough homeless shelters to house everyone, how could there be enough money to pay for UBI high enough that everyone can afford a roof over their head?

[K0balt]

Money has never been the problem for homelessness. It costs cities more money to deal with homeless people than it does to build public housing if the city provides the will to do so. This has been proven out time and time again.

There are many, many perverse incentives involved in keeping homeless people homeless.

At the general level, for many people witnessing exigent poverty is a calming horror. “I’m doing ok I guess”

Then, the broken healthcare system. We would need to acknowledge that we have an ill society that refuses to provide care for its victims and even its children.

Also, the homeless are a very useful spectacle to keeping people in line, a constant reminder that most people are a couple of bad months from living under a bridge. This prevents people from organizing for better pay, better conditions, better lives…. Facilitating the harvesting of all of the excess value that they can be coerced into providing for their employers.

What UBI does, as proven time and again, is empower people to risk looking for better jobs, better lives. Reduce the stress of daily life by removing the spectacle of losing your family and living in a box down by the park.

That people find the idea of this intolerable speaks volumes about the society we inhabit.

[int_19h]

Wealthy countries could afford this even with proper housing, food etc (not fancy, but not tent/slop either). Even not so wealthy ones could afford something. You have to go back all the way to hunter/gatherer societies to have a situation where each person's productive labor only generates enough wealth to feed themselves. In any modern industrial society, the productivity is long past the point where each person produces enough to satisfy multiple people's needs, in aggregate. The only problem is that most of this generated wealth is then directed to satisfy the whims of the very few people at the top who get to collect economic rent from the rest of us.