[essnine]

The assumption here that UBI "incentivizes non-productive behavior and disincentivizes productive activity" is the part that doesn't make sense. What do you think universal means? How does it disincentivize productive activity if it is provided to everyone regardless of their income/productivity/employment/whatever?

[juniperus]

Evolutionarily, people engage in productive activity in order to secure resources to ensure their survival and reproduction. When these necessary resources are gifted to a person, there is a lower chance that they will decide to take part in economically productive behavior.

You can say that because it is universal, it should level the playing field just at a different starting point, but you are still creating a situation where even incredibly intelligent people will choose to pursue leisure over labor, in fact, the most intelligent people may be the ones to be more aware of the pointlessness of working if they can survive on UBI. Similarly, the most intelligent people will consider the arrangement unfair and unsustainable and instead of devoting their intelligence toward economically productive ventures, they will devote their abilities toward dismantling the system. This is the groundwork of a revolution. The most intelligent will prefer a system where their superior intelligence provides them with sufficient resources to choose a high-quality mate. If they see an arrangement where high-quality mates are being obtained by individuals who they deem to be receiving benefits that they cannot defend/protect adequately, such an arrangement will be dismantled. This evolutionary drive is hundreds of millions of years old. Primitive animals will take resources from others that they observe to be unable to defend their status.

So, overall, UBI will probably be implemented, and it will probably end in economic crisis, revolution, and the resumption of this cycle that has been playing out over and over for centuries.

[throwaway0123_5]

> You can say that because it is universal, it should level the playing field just at a different starting point, but you are still creating a situation where even incredibly intelligent people will choose to pursue leisure over labor, in fact, the most intelligent people may be the ones to be more aware of the pointlessness of working if they can survive on UBI.

This doesn't seem believable to me, or at least it isn't the whole story. Pre-20th century it seems like most scientific and mathematical discoveries came from people who were born into wealthy families and were able to pursue whatever interested them without concern for whether or not it would make them money. Presumably there were/are many people who could've contributed greatly if they didn't have to worry about putting food on the table.

> The most intelligent will prefer a system where their superior intelligence provides them with sufficient resources to choose a high-quality mate.

In a scenario where UBI is necessary because AI has supplanted human intelligence, it seems like the only way they could return to such a system is by removing both UBI and AI. Remove just UBI and they're still non-competitive economically against the AIs.

[LouisSayers]

> When these necessary resources are gifted to a person, there is a lower chance that they will decide to take part in economically productive behavior.

Source?

Even if that's true though, who cares if AI and robots are doing the work?

What's so bad about allowing people leisure, time to do whatever they want? What are you afraid of?

[essnine]

There are two things bothering me here. The first bit where you're talking about motivations and income driving it seems either very reductive or implying of something that ought to be profoundly upsetting: - that intelligent people will see that the work they do is pointless if they're paid enough to survive and care for themselves, and not see work as another source of income for better financial security - that most intelligent people will see it as exploitation and then choose to focus on dismantling the system that levels the playing field

Which sort of doesn't add up. So there are intelligent people who are working right now because they need money and don't have it, while the other intelligent people who are working and employing other people are only doing it to make money and will rebel if they lose some of the money they make.

But then, why doesn't the latter group of intelligent people just stop working if they have enough money? Are they less/more/differently intelligent than the former group? Are we thinking about other, more narrow forms of intelligence when describing either?

Also

> The most intelligent will prefer a system where their superior intelligence provides them with sufficient resources to choose a high-quality mate. If they see an arrangement where high-quality mates are being obtained by individuals who they deem to be receiving benefits that they cannot defend/protect adequately, such an arrangement will be dismantled. This evolutionary drive is hundreds of millions of years old.

I don't want to come off as mocking here - it's hard to take these points seriously. The whole point of civilization is to rise above these behaviours and establish a strong foundation for humanity as a whole. The end goal of social progress and the image of how society should be structured cannot be modeled on systems that existed in the past solely because those failure modes are familiar and we're fine with losing people as long as we know how our systems fail them. That evolutionary drive may be millions of years old, but industrial society has been around for a few centuries, and look at what it's done to the rest of the world.

> Primitive animals will take resources from others that they observe to be unable to defend their status.

Yeah, I don't know what you're getting at with this metaphor. If you're talking predatory behaviour, we have plenty of that going around as things are right now. You don't think something like UBI will help more people "defend their status"?

> it will probably end in economic crisis, revolution, and the resumption of this cycle that has been playing out over and over for centuries

I don't think human civilization has ever been close to this massive or complex or dysfunctional in the past, so this sentence seems meaningless, but I'm no historian.

[CER10TY]

I guess the thinking goes like this: Why start a business, get a higher paying job etc if you're getting ~2k€/mo in UBI and can live off of that? Since more people will decide against starting a business or increasing their income, productive activity decreases.

[essnine]

I see more people starting businesses because they now have less risk, more people not changing jobs just to get a pay hike. The sort of financial aid UBI would bring might even make people more productive on the whole, since people who are earning have spare income for quality of life, and people with financial risk are able to work without being worried half the day about paying rent and bills.

It's a bit of a dunk on people who see their position as employer/supervisor as a source of power because they can impose financial risk as punishment on people, which happens more often than any of us care to think, but isn't that a win? Or are we conceding that modern society is driven more by stick than carrot and we want it that way?

[lotsoweiners]

If everyone has 2k/mo then nobody has 2k/mo.

[LouisSayers]

That's like saying "money doesn't exist".

In a sense everybody does have "2k" a month, because we all have the same amount of time to do productive things and exchange with others.