I usually write about economics — albeit in much more radical contexts. David Graeber liked my critique of one of his books enough to retweet it.

This is just going to be a series of factual statements on UBI, not arguments for or against doing or not doing anything.

I’m not terribly interested in making moral arguments for this. You have your own values, and what I say here will drive you towards or against the proposal, depending on those. Nor am I interested in arguing for a particular candidate. In fact, I think that I could write an entire article on everything that’s wrong with Yang.

I’d describe myself as more-or-less in favor of a UBI, but I don’t think that it’s likely to be as easy to achieve or as all-solving as its more rabid fans seem to.

1 — a basic income promotes small-scale investment

Poor people make short-term decisions, because their futures are inevitably so uncertain. This means that, when they do get money, they spend it on meeting their immediate needs — not on education, better tools for themselves, or other ways to ensure more income in the long term.

According to Business Insider, when a charity gave everyone in a rural Kenyan village $22 a month (with the promise of this continuing for the next 12 years):

Anecdotal evidence and nearly all empirical research has shown that unconditional cash transfers help people help themselves. Recipients often use the income to pay for their kids’ school fees, buy medicine, repair their homes, and invest in their small businesses to further grow their wealth. While some use the money for so-called “temptation goods,” as economists call them, the majority of recipients defy the stereotype that people in poverty somehow lack moral character or responsibility.

A basic income, even one that is too small to live off of, gives long-term stability. This long-term stability leads to decision-making focused on longer-term outcomes.

2 — it would supercharge the labor movement

It’s no secret that organized labor has had its setbacks in America, over the last 50 years or so. I’ll spare you the gory details of the political choices and economic forces that lead to this outcome, besides noting that political choices played a large role in this, and instead show you this graph:

Being in a union doesn’t just increase your income. It increases the income of every other worker — that’s the invisible hand of the market. If workers at one workplace are paid more, bosses at other workplaces will have to pay those non-union workers more (and treat them better!) or those workers will quit to go work at a unionized workplace. Because of this, 33% versus 10% doesn’t just mean that 23% of the workforce is worse off — it means that 100% of the workforce is worse off!

One of the reasons behind this de-unionization has been ever-increasing economic precarity: with rising prices and stagnating wages, it has become harder and harder to accept the lost income from striking.

This is another way in which poor people are forced to make short-term decisions: they can’t “spend” that money (by which I mean: they cannot afford to not have that money in the first place) by going on strike now to increase their income long-term.

With basic income, though, this would be less of a factor: if you went on strike, you would still have the basic income. Because of this, strikes could happen more easily and could last longer.

3 —wages would rise under a UBI

With a UBI, people would have less incentive to accept low-paying jobs, because they would need them less — which would cause wages to rise.

Unemployment is an important factor in wages: high unemployment causes wages to fall, as people are more desperate for work and employers are aware that they still get applicants for a lower wage.

People put value on their free time, just as they value money. The more money they have, the less they will value additional money. The less free time they have, the more they will value additional free time. In economics, this phenomenon is called ‘decreasing marginal utility’.

Basic income increases the amount of money that everyone has. Because of decreasing marginal utility, this decreases how much people value money. However, the amount that they value their free time is unchanged. So, employers will have to pay more for the same amount of work.

4 — people would move to take advantage of it

Right now, this country — and the world — is urbanizing: people are moving from rural areas to urban ones. They are doing this partially for cultural reasons (cities are more accepting of a variety of sorts of lifestyles and people, while rural areas are often extremely bigoted and intolerant) and partially so that they can have better access to goods and services (which may be difficult to access in rural areas) but mostly so that they can pursue more and better jobs, which are concentrated in urban areas.

However, a federal-only UBI would slow or possibly even reverse this: people might prefer not to work, or to work less, and so would move somewhere with as low a cost of living as possible. Such places are all rural.

Densely-populated states, counties, or especially cities might have to offer UBIs of their own to avoid losing population to less densely-populated areas. However, densely-populated areas have higher per capita and total GDPs than less densely-populated ones, and so can afford such localized UBIs.

5 — how it gets paid for matters

Paying for a UBI is expensive, and probably means new taxes. The question of what those taxes will be is one that divides advocates of UBI. Some, like Andrew Yang, want to use a tax on consumption and production to pay for it. Others, like the geolibertarians, want to tax land ownership. There are other proposals (increased or redirected income taxes, taxes on activity in the stock market, etc.) but these are two of the most popular.

A tax on production and consumption, like Andrew Yang proposes, would hamper production and reduce our ability to consume.

A tax on land ownership (but not the buildings on that land) wouldn’t — and, more importantly, land cannot be moved to escape taxation.