In my opinion the basic income idea is the good way to go.
In my mind UBI means stability, stability means better, thought out choice choice of employment, better work choice means less abuse by employers (who happily exploit people on the edge) AND more happiness, therefore less stress and higher productivity.
It's not a perfect solution, as there will be people who will refuse to work, but those would in my honest opinion use their time to socialize with others, and less stressed people who actually work would, at least in part, happily resocialize people left out through socialization and natural integration. Social circles mean opportunity, opportunities mean chances of success in finding work.
Tech giants are predicting widespread, permanent unemployment. Jobs that currently pay something like $20k to maybe $50k are supposed to be replaced with basic income paying more like $10k. If large swaths of the population are going to take a de facto pay cut over jobs that in some places are already considered poverty wages AND then they have little or no hope of securing paid income to supplement their UBI, this sounds like a terrible nightmare to me.
I would much rather people be working on new ways to spread the work around while improving quality of life for the masses. You know, the policy they pursued during the last Industrial Revolution when automation was threatening to eliminate jobs.
It is one of those ideas that is neat, plausible and wrong. It suffers from several fallacies of composition.
The money becomes worthless in the eyes of those that receive it, and that's because if I have spent my time growing carrots - even if I have used machines to grow lots and lots of carrots, I still need to see you give up your time in the service of others before I am happy to let you have carrots.
If you don't, then you are not seen as contributing to society and humans get upset when that happens.
That's because you get paid twice in real terms. Once by the self-consumption of your own time and once with the consumption of the output of others you have purchased with your basic income.
That is seen as unfair.
The correct solution is to organise your time to the service of others as a job. A job that is focussed on social value, not profit. You then get the living wage for that job - a wage that is much higher than any suggested basic income, without any need to increase taxation.
The problem is a lack of jobs. The problem is the fallacy that the private sector creates jobs, when in reality its task is to destroy them and replace them with automation. A task we need it to do if we're to drive productivity forward.
In my mind UBI means stability, stability means better, thought out choice choice of employment, better work choice means less abuse by employers (who happily exploit people on the edge) AND more happiness, therefore less stress and higher productivity.
It's not a perfect solution, as there will be people who will refuse to work, but those would in my honest opinion use their time to socialize with others, and less stressed people who actually work would, at least in part, happily resocialize people left out through socialization and natural integration. Social circles mean opportunity, opportunities mean chances of success in finding work.