WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

U.B.I. is a safeguard against the future

Mr. Yang argues that automation and artificial intelligence will soon throw millions of Americans out of work and that a basic income will be the only way to guarantee them a decent standard of living. “We have five to 10 years before truckers lose their jobs,” Mr. Yang told The Times, “and all hell breaks loose.”

There’s good reason to be skeptical of cataclysmic predictions of humanity’s obsolescence, since automation has been eliminating jobs, and creating new ones, for hundreds of years. As Robert B. Reich writes in The Times, technological disruption may simply produce a future without many good jobs, a crisis whose beginnings we have already begun to see:

What will happen when robots push most people out of steady work and into lower-wage gig jobs? I doubt we’ll see a revolution. A more likely scenario is a slow slouch toward authoritarianism and xenophobia. We may already be there.

Against the shearing forces of economic inequality and dislocation, the country may need a U.B.I. to keep from coming apart. “I’m a capitalist,” Mr. Yang has said, “and I believe that universal basic income is necessary for capitalism to continue.”

U.B.I. would be costly and devalue work

Mr. Yang’s plan would both discourage and devalue work, writes Matthew Continetti in National Review. In its current incarnation, the American welfare system uses means-tested benefits that tie receiving financial assistance to looking for a job, a connection the U.B.I. would sever. But he argues it would also undermine the dignity of work itself, a viewpoint that Joe Biden seems to share. Continetti writes:

Even the most unskilled labor possesses dignity because of the human being who performs it. Nor is employment just a means to a paycheck. … Having a job gives you a reason to get out of bed in the morning. It embeds you in a community.

On a policy level, some progressives and conservatives agree that the U.B.I. is too blunt an instrument for reducing poverty. As the paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found, a U.B.I. large enough to increase transfers to low-income families would be “enormously expensive.” Megan McArdle writes in Bloomberg:

There’s no real reason for voters to want to shuck their current welfare state for one that is either much more expensive or cuts benefits for current beneficiaries, while throwing in some possibly strong disincentives for lower-skilled people to hold jobs.

U.B.I. would lead to a fairer and happier society

The University of Pennsylvania economist Ioana Marinescu rejects the idea that a U.B.I. would produce a nation of idlers, since it’s not enough to live on. “It reduces the number of hours individuals work, but not the total number of people classified as employed,” she tells Teen Vogue. Instead, Annie Lowrey, the author of “Give People Money,” argues in The Globe and Mail that a U.B.I. would give workers, particularly low-income ones, more power to structure what their working lives look like.

But Lowrey also notes that part of the policy’s appeal is its potential to change our conception of work and its primacy in our culture:

A U.B.I. might foreground the social role of care-taking, by providing people with a kind of socially sponsored “wage” for assisting a parent or nurturing a baby. Such payments might thus be particularly powerful for women, who provide the lion’s share of uncompensated care work in both Canada and the United States.

Because of the racial poverty and income gaps, a U.B.I. would disproportionately benefit African-Americans, which some say proves the need for the policy’s universality. As Christine Emba points out in The Washington Post, whites are less likely to support welfare programs when they’re told that blacks might benefit. Dorian T. Warren argues in The Boston Review that “progressives are in a stronger position arguing for a universal program, knowing that it will in fact benefit African Americans greatly.”

U.B.I. is capitalism’s bait and switch

Alyssa Battistoni argues in Dissent that the U.B.I. is an idea without an ideology. While it has radical potential, it also risks serving as a Trojan horse for right-wing economics:

The version of basic income we get will depend, more than policies with a clearer ideological valence, on the political forces that shape it. Which is why the prospect of pushing for basic income in the United States right now — when the right controls everything — should be cause for alarm.

That’s why U.B.I. is so favored by Silicon Valley elites, writes Carmen Petaccio in The New Inquiry: It promises to placate the working class without actually changing the fundamental relations between bosses and workers, the rich and the poor. He writes:

The aim is pacification, not liberation. A universal basic income is, in the most cynical sense, a subtle kind of doomsday prep for the tech billionaire, a means to diffuse the revolutionary potential of the working class by supplying them with the absolute bare minimum, just enough to keep them almost happy, fat in the apps.

This argument shares similarities with Karl Marx’s opposition to the concept, as Nathan Heller writes for The New Yorker: “A society with a basic income has no pressure to pay employees a good wage, because the bottom constraint, subsistence, has fallen away.”

THE TAKEAWAY

The idea of a U.B.I. has been debated for centuries and, as an instrument of eliminating poverty, deserves to be taken seriously. But as with any universal economic program, there is no way around the politics of picking where the money comes from and who reaps the greatest benefits: Would it require those who need it least to pay for those who need it most, or would it simply hide existing inequality behind a slick veneer of egalitarianism?