The universal basic income is a utopia, but ultimately not realizable in practice

The 2,000 artists will be randomly selected from applications if they meet certain criteria. Artists not selected will be used as a control group to compare results after the three years.

What we are not told and what has become a sensitive issue in behavioral science is what defines success.

A resilient program should publish now what is expected and what will actually be found in three years.

Behavioral economics has been the subject of controversy lately, as some famous experiments with astonishing conclusions turned out to be based on questionable data and retrospective analysis.

How successful is this experiment? increased productivity? Commercial viability? More quality of life? Creative freedom? How is this measured? If eliminating income insecurity is the answer, what was the question?

So I’m not sure what the process is supposed to tell us.

But I’m sure what it won’t tell us.

It will tell us nothing about how universal basic income would work. I emphasize this because the idea of ​​experimenting with artists was suggested by Social Justice Ireland who are promoting the introduction of a Universal Basic Income or UBI.

UBI is super fashionable. It’s also very messy because its many proponents have different ideas about “universal” and “basic income.”

In its purest form, UBI is paid to everyone in the country from birth to death, regardless of income or status.

It would replace the entire welfare system – with the exception of health or education – which costs a fortune to administer in its means-testing and complexity. All benefits such as unemployment benefit, child benefit, single parent pension and old-age pension would drop in favor of a simple payment.

Instinctively, it feels unfair that wealthy people should be paid by the state. But it’s taxable, so the richer you are, the more likely you are to end up paying it back in taxes.

But every time someone proposes UBI, one question must be asked: Why?

For example, UBI is popular in Silicon Valley, where tech giants believe artificial intelligence will destroy millions of jobs. I’m skeptical that will happen, but we could have a future with a highly skilled elite in high-paying jobs and teeming masses of unemployed.

So the UBI solves a problem for billionaire libertarians faced with a population of unoccupied proletarians. If they pay us a basic income, we could read books, play sports, take care of our children and do low-paying service jobs.

Sure, when the robots have taken over, what else are you going to do?

But a left perspective is
completely different.

They try to solve the problem of a welfare system with its inequality and notorious poverty traps in which the recipients cannot work because they would lose their benefits. A system where everyone gets equal pay would remove these barriers and encourage people to seek work. It would also remove the stigma and psychological pitfalls of receiving welfare.

But if the UBI is supposed to replace the abolition of social assistance and is actually financed, how much is a “basic income”?

Social Justice Ireland proposed €208 a week – the current core social benefit – and criticized the artists’ tariff of €325 as a flaw in the experiment. It’s too high to be scalable. However, €208 a week is not enough to live on and Social Justice Ireland accepts that some people need to top up their basic income.

However, this means that the great advantages of the uniform payment – ​​elimination of social administration costs and unconditional nature – are lost.

This is the circle that UBI advocates cannot close: create an unconditional basic income that is sufficient to live on and is therefore unaffordable; or a sub-living wage that must be supplemented by the traditional social infrastructure it is designed to replace.

As the British economist John Kay puts it: “Either the basic income is impossibly low, or the expenditure on it is impossibly high.” €325 is too much. €208 is not enough.

As a matter of fact, John Bruton dabbled in this decades ago, before it was a trendy idea, and came to the same conclusion. The totals didn’t add up then and still don’t.

Other critics say that a BGE could act as a deterrent to work at all.

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, who specialize in “bad economics,” argue that there is no evidence for this. They say work gives people meaning that no payment can replace.

They support a UUBI, or Ultra Universal Basic Income, in poor countries like India, where those living on $1 a day would get a big boost from a secure income. For example, it would encourage those barely living on unsustainable farms to move to the cities to find better jobs.

But in developed economies, the numbers just don’t add up.

Faced with this reality, Universal Basic Income is doomed to cocktail talks in a Venn diagram oddly occupied by the earnest left and the libertarian right.

I’m happy for the artists who, with their 325 € per week, can compose their masterpieces without going hungry. It’s an interesting experiment, all right, but we just don’t know what.