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A UBI is a necessity for societies going forward.
Basically, wealth inequality is so bad now that our economies and societies no longer serve the majority of people's needs.
So wealth redistribution is required to fix the problem, the question after realizing that is how to go about it.
We can do a one time redistribution of wealth, but without fundamentally changing the system with regulations, incomes will inevitably become imbalanced again. This is what we did after the Great Depression with the jobs program that was the national parks and highway/railroad projects.
IMO it's better to just stop treating money like it's harmless to allow excess accumulation. It would be better if all wealth were perpetually redistribed via a UBI, this would permanently maintain wealth equality. This is similar to what we did after the Great Depression in regards to corporate tax rates and setting a maximum profit.
I think absolute ceilings and floors on income and wealth will be needed. The wealthy are basically black holes that destroys everything within reach, if given time. Preventing such singularities of excess will have to be through a system designed to give everyone UBI, while making jobs rewarding but with a fixed scope of wealth accumulation.
IMO, a system of classifying entire job classes, and giving them a fixed income rank, would make it harder for wage theft, hoarding, and corruption to happen. By making it so that everyone of a job class has a clear income regardless of location or hours, it will be easier to track who is unnaturally wealthy, thus their hoard can be more easily confiscated before it can do harm to society.
Also, through having fixed incomes, it might prevent inflation. Sellers will have to price according to income brackets, otherwise their goods cannot sell easily to a demographic. In the rankings that I proposed, a basic worker has $30k, while the highest earners get $60k after taxation. This essentially means that CEOs and other high-end careers are only double the value of a waiter's income. Goods will have to be priced accordingly, making it harder for inflation to take place.
I personally don't think it's healthy for a society to force a caste system like that. And I'm not really sure there's truth to the "if everyone gets paid the same then nobody will want to be a Dr" argument. People would still probably pursue more difficult work even without a profit incentive.
It isn't a caste thing. Typically, castes are all about locking people into a social strata forever. What I proposed includes education paying people for learning, which allows the students to be fully educated for the higher ranks of jobs, if they so choose. Also, people who work earn retirement pay at a 1:1 ratio of days worked - eventually, people get to quit working outright if they want, regardless of rank, simply because two or three decades of work is also fully paid retirement. People who quit working the high end jobs, coincidentally leave those jobs to other people.
In any case, there isn't a huge gulf of incomes in the proposed system. The real-world elite of our time has over a 1,000x the income of an entry wage worker. Merely double the income for the hardest professions doesn't even register in comparison. More importantly, the increased money for a high position is to reward the effort, risk, and knowledge needed to hold that position.
Over the next two centuries, I expect automation to make work into a leisure activity, rather than a necessity. Until utopia is obtained, however, we should try to reasonably reward people to work the more difficult jobs, simply out of pragmatic utility and humanity for society as a whole. By ensuring the pool of experts is large, we can spread thin the amount of hours each individual has to work, preventing burnout and allowing them all to live fulfilling lives.
It is a caste thing.
What happens when the majority decide they want more pay, pursue education, and oversaturate the good paying jobs?
Those are the conditions that led to STEM being completely oversaturated.
This beleif that a garbage man is somehow less important to society than doctors, is just capitalist propaganda...
ERK: Effort, Risk, Knowledge. We can have a body of researchers study each occupation, and assign it a rank according to what is required for the task. Provided the standards are objective - the amount of hours, the physical conditions a worker has to undergo, how much education is required to do a good job, and so forth are fairly consistent, we can fairly designate the rank of a job.
Garbage men don't require nearly as much training as a doctor, otherwise people die. In any case, a garbage man would likely be at the $60k rank, because it is harder than being a waiter. Lots of sitting and driving, with the odd garbage handling in person if something comes up. The biggest source of danger comes from crashes. Far as education goes, not much, I expect - mostly cartography of the route, scheduling, and so forth.
An immigrant worker would probably have their job class at $80k annual payout if they picked food. There is lots of exertion, sun, inclement weather, and so forth. The work itself isn't dangerous nor requires an education, it is simply exhausting. Provided that 4 or so hours of a six hour shift are done before a hour-long noon lunch, the danger of heat exhaustion from the sun can be mitigated, especially if workers are given hats, water, and 5 minute breaks for each hour to recuperate. Hazard pay can be in effect during significant levels of rain, and appropriate gear mandated for those conditions.
As to STEM being oversaturated, I think that is incorrect. Rather, it is because corporations are hyper-fixated on crushing blood out of a stone to maximize perceived profit. Everyone in every working profession has to work longer and are paid less, because the companies force that to be the case. By deliberately creating ghost jobs, using maladjusted interviews, coercion, and so on, companies can artificially force workers to come to the table to beg for scraps. If there was a 6-hour workday, mandated vacations, and other ethical standards that are enforced, companies would have to employ many more STEM students to fill out the daily roster.
Ok you have shown me you don't know what you are talking about and aren't interested in learning.
UBI is the new hotness in terms of popular modern means talked about to undo the ever-growing wealth gap, but it is completely untested in the real world. It has challenges even on paper, including the ones I alluded to above involving being exceptionally susceptible income uncertainty and government corruption.
And you are right to point out that anything we do now to correct the wealth disparity problem is wasted if we don't do enough to prevent another regression back to this same state again. I'm sure UBI could work under the right conditions, as well as many other solutions, but the real success or failure of the program will be measured based on how well and for how long it can resist attempts to dismantle it by bad-faith actors.
I am pretty sure there's a lot of agreement here on the core of the issue, I just have doubts about UBI because it puts the fate of the most vulnerable citizens with the most easily-ignored political voice even more into the hands of their government, who often do them dirty.
It's been tested dozens of times, and every time it is tested, it shows people are happier and healthier, and so is their community.
So it does work and is possible, and it would fix a ton of problems.
I mean at the scale at which it would be used. A small pilot program that has millions of eyes on it is not going to get undermined by bad actors because everyone is watching. It is good to create tests and pilot programs to try new economic and governance systems, but it is also important to remember that those are idealized lab conditions.
Also, consider the context of the discussion. Literally any system where money is put in the hands of those in poverty is going to immediately result in improved conditions for those people and increased local taxable economic activity. I could give them a UBI stipend, big tax rebates, increased wages, or even drop cash from planes. The point is that it is not necessarily the method that made the difference but the result. In this case the result is "get buying power to poor people", and any system that achieves that is going to be an economic and social good.
I'm just not convinced UBI is the safe way to do that. Its an inescapable fact that any government is going to have internal forces trying to undermine its protections to enrich themselves, so it is wise to remember that any government systems we come up with that are not made highly resistant to capture are only going to serve their intended purpose temporarily.
In every study they also witness no significant drop in labor participation, and it always enriches the local community. People become more altruistic, less stressed and agitated, family relationships improve. It's good in pretty much every single way with no discernible downsides. Please look into more studies.
There isn't going to ever be a study that is universal until we implement it universally, so there's literally no way to test it in the way critics want, this argument is just baseless propaganda.
I'm sure that's true, but again, the positive outcomes you're describing are the result of the poor peoples' increased buying power and reduced economic uncertainty. I don't believe the specifics of HOW they got those things makes very much of a difference, if any. UBI is one way of many to do that.
And you are again correct: there is no way to "dry run" new social programs fully. You can only create small "labs" to partially test them, which is way better than nothing, but still leaves great unknowns. The only truly tested social and economic structures are the ones we've seen really used in the real world.
The fact that all past models have eventually failed doesn't necessarily mean they were bad, though. It means that they were inadequately protected and eventually were corrupted from within (not counting conquest, which I think is safe to say is outside the scope of this conversation).
How would you do the necessary task of redistributing the excess wealth of the rich to the poor in a way that leaves the rich in a position where they can't accumulate and abuse their wealth again?
What I personally would do is:
That isn't the hard part, though. Like i said, there are a ton of solutions to THAT problem that can work, including yours. The really hard problem is that I am not sure how to protect a government from allowing officials elected under false pretenses from dismantling the solution for disingenuous reasons, like is happening throughout the entire developed world in real time right now, despite their varied social, economic, and governmental structures.
ETA: I would also include people with debilitating mental health as among the disabled for purposes of eligibility for the social fund aid.