[buu700]

A true UBI might be hard to fund today, but it's not inherently hard to fund in principle.

Mathematically speaking, any UBI amount (or other expansionary monetary policy) could be offset by an equal and opposite increase in aggregate supply, resulting in more money with net zero inflation. If we had 100x higher annual growth in supply of housing/food/energy/transportation/healthcare/electronics/etc., creating 100x more annual growth in money supply would counter the positive supply shock to keep the purchasing power of a dollar stable; the fact that more dollars would exist would simply reflect the reality of having more stuff to go around.

Whether and how it may be possible to achieve such supply growth, however, is another matter entirely. While I'm personally optimistic about the technological trajectories of AI, solar/fusion, and humanoid robotics, optimizing/liberalizing Western economies and adjusting to a post-labor-scarcity world will both be at best politically turbulent.

The incentive for the wealthy to go along with such policies is that it would be a practical necessity in order to continue selling their stuff. If 90% of the population lacked a survivable income, that wouldn't be a functioning economy, it would be a precursor to civil war. Even so, private corporations won't want to voluntarily employ people they don't need, because that's just a textbook prisoner's dilemma. On the other hand, publicly funding such capital distribution puts the corporations on a level playing field relative to one another while enabling business to continue as usual.

[mitthrowaway2]

My suggestion would be to drive the policy the other way around: whenever there is deflation measured in the previous year, it automatically triggers a UBI "deflation dividend" scaled to create price stability, distributed equally to everyone.

[thelastgallon]

It probably won't be a straight up cash, but something like what Cuba does: Cuba does not have a Universal Basic Income (UBI). Instead, the Cuban government guarantees basic survival through a socialist welfare system, consisting of state-controlled employment, heavily subsidized utilities, free universal healthcare and education, and a monthly ration book (Libreta de Abastecimiento) for basic food items.

For UBI to work, the precondition is Universal Billionaire Income, so it will look something like this when its implemented: The Secretive Conglomerate That Controls Cuba’s Economy: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/05/16/world/america...

[buu700]

Personally, I'm not entirely opposed to UBI, but what I'd rather see is a system of guaranteed jobs and educational/training stipends (with part-time and/or remote options). The reason for that is primarily fault tolerance: in the event that a major disaster renders our AI/computational infrastructure inoperable (or adversarial), it's imperative that humanity itself act as a redundant store of all the information necessary to preserve or reboot civilization.

That being said, I do think UBI (with some guardrails) is still preferable to making everyone consume services provided exclusively by government monopolies. Not because anything provided by the government in particular is going to be magically low-quality, but because any monopoly is inherently insulated from long-term systemic incentives to compete on price and quality.