We already have UBI

I first heard about universal basic income (UBI) on Reddit over a decade ago. This was before Andrew Yang incorporated it into his platform for the 2020 Democratic primary. If anything, he was trying to capitalize on the Reddit hype around this concept. Discussions about UBI become boring very quickly; it’s fun to contemplate how exactly it would work and how it’d be implemented, but all those discussions run into one very obvious wall—there is no political will to make it happen.

For many people, the most fun part of thinking about our “inevitable” UBI future is imagining what kind of a utopia it would build. (It’s always utopia, by the way, UBI proponents never think it would lead to anything less.) They love finding examples of attempted UBI-adjacent programs with tiny sample sizes around the world and pointing to all the positive data that comes out as an argument for why we should all be oh-so excited at the concept. That fact is that you don’t have to wonder what the world will look like if we implement universal basic income for one simple reason: we already have early-stage UBI.

In terms of basic economic data, life in America has never been better. Derek Thompson recently summarized a lot of the good economic data in his recent piece attempting to dissect why, despite all those good numbers, we’re still so profoundly unhappy. Low-wage growth has outpaced median and high-wage growth in recent years. Fake email jobs are abundant for anyone with enough luck and skill to get one. America’s poorest citizens are fatter than people in upper castes, indicating that calories are cheaper and more abundant than ever before. Across the country, people are able to afford basic housing, groceries, and a variety of hobbies that let them attend the local gaming convention dressed up as their favorite comic book hero.

Early-stage UBI is essentially already here. If the hope is that UBI provides people a minimum income stream to allow them to afford basic life necessities, most of us already afford all of those things. It has never been easier to work as little as possible while earning a decent wage that allows one to pay for an apartment, transportation, food, and still have some left over for a gaming PC with thirty unplayed farming simulators. Everyone from the cubicle office worker to the cashier at Kwik Trip is getting disproportionately more money for doing significantly less work than any of their ancestors.

Despite all those positive signs of a prospering society, loneliness is on the rise, people are leaving their home less often, romance seems to have died, childlessness is increasingly common, and any attempt to measure happiness, however problematic they may be, continually shows that we’re more depressed than ever. When theorizing about the impact of UBI, why would we assume that it would lead to a utopia when it’s clear that all UBI would do is crank the dial up on all these existing modern trends?

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You know what I think would happen if we had UBI? More of what we have now. The cashier at Kwik Trip, who failed to start after graduating high school, and now lives in a studio apartment filled top-to-bottom with Funko Pop figurines, which account for a full 20% of their entire personality, will multiply in number. The burnout stoner who, having barely cracked his eyes open in the morning, and rolls over to his side to reach for his hash oil vape, will multiply in number. The depressed cubicle email job employee, who commutes to the office dressed in casual workwear and goes home to a bare-walled townhouse in a new development—entirely devoid of any tree taller than six feet—to eat frozen pizza and play a first person shooter with friends he’s slowly losing touch with before crying himself to sleep, will multiply in number.

UBI would multiply the side effects of modernity, and we don’t like these side effects. Pumping of cash into the pockets of millions of Americans would undeniably help the most destitute, it would undeniably help afford more consumption of every kind, and, in my opinion, it would undeniably make people less happy and more disconnected. If these are the things people choose to do with their increased wages and ridiculously low-cost food now, why would we assume they would do anything different if they got even more money? My assumption is that the number of people living entirely online, completely disembodied, will skyrocket, which would bring with it even more of the problems we currently detest.

The pro-UBI position often imagines that, having been freed from financial burden, people would starting working on themselves; exploring new hobbies, developing their skills, dipping their toes into art or writing, or starting a garden. Folks, we already see what people choose to do when burdens are alleviated—they choose to do the things they’re currently doing. UBI would cement this purposeless, driftless existence millions of us are already experiencing into the permanent structure of our society. Man does not willingly take on hard, thankless tasks, even if they are very fruitful. Clearly, the average human chooses to live a life of ease and comfort, having covered all of their basic needs, and he’s worse off for it.

I do not have all the solutions to our modern woes. Touch grass, log off, put the phone down, make friends, see people, fall in love, have kids, work out, do something hard, get good at something—this advice is commonplace at this point, and I can only reiterate that those are the right ways to approach living a healthier, more fulfilled life. But I certainly don’t think implementing UBI will somehow make people function any differently than they already function. If anything, it would subsidize more people to make the same mistakes many of us are already making.

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