Math arguments won’t inspire a shift to UBI.
The real story is about the moral imperative — a chance out of a dead end life. We need to get better at talking about that part.
The triumph of launching universal basic income (UBI) will never be solely about persuasion via maths. 🧢
Just like the US gov flushing the system with stimulus during the pandemic wasn’t about maths but about necessity, survival. Millions of hours were dedicated in polemic pugilism on “basic math” showing that the stimulus would lead to hyperinflation instead of the relatively soft landing we’re seeing now. Economists don’t have a crystal ball no matter how internally logical the math is; there are just too many variables.
Another example: Millions of hours wasted debating the maths of the ACA and how it would surely collapse the healthcare system within the first year, instead of it being a commonly acknowledged success, ensuring millions and raising the floor on healthcare access, with the only sacrifice being a trivially less posh level of care for those at the top, and it annoyed some of the financially ambitious doctors, and added some unwelcome bureaucracy to the lives of affluent, coddled patients.
But ACA saves lives, which is more important than whatever was sacrificed in the balance.
Now with the UBI debate, we waste millions of hours parsing the maths, only to discover that economists have zero idea what’s going to happen; even if you do a logic grade school math problem of addition and subtraction, there are factors we can’t account for, and we all know this.
The real issue? Desirability. Do the people want UBI, do they demand it? That’s the bigger question.
The real pushback is not about math, aka the feasibility argument, which is a red herring. The real blocker is about rigid values and ideals, aka the desirability argument.
I have seen rigorous math debates soundly show that the math of UBI isn’t a problem.
Yang’s campaign hat said MATH. Making MATH the main platform slogan and sacred icon was a…miscalculation.
Because math arguments are too hard for average people to follow, and we’re all street-smart enough to know that any math can be made to work if the problem is framed to yield the implications you want to see. Math, too, is subject to motivated reasoning.
While it’s true that “facts don’t care about your feelings,” truth cares about bad faith framing and confirmation bias — which is the act of focusing on some facts and intentionally ignoring others.
Whenever a UBI opponent was cornered into acquiescence on the math part for UBI making reasonable sense, what happened? Did we win the game and take a victory lap?
No! Because the second the math supporting UBI appeared to be remotely plausible the goalposts moved. It morphed into a debate of values.
Example:
“Okay, so even if the math could work, UBI is a terrible idea because people are lazy, and a hard days work for a hard days pay is the way it’s always been.”
Or…
“But won’t it make people bored and listless with nothing to do…if JOBS FOR SURVIVAL (in a system made up of horrible low paid jobs designed to carry a good amount of unemployment to lower wages and enrich owners) are taken away? Won’t that just make life meaningless…if we don’t FORCE people to work to eat?”
These rhetorical questions shut down the conversation easily because they appeal to folk wisdom, and most UBI proponents are not conversant in the rebuttals and instead make the Yang mistake of focusing on the maths, to the exclusion of the deeply moral and science-backed aspects of implementing a UBI.
We’re not going to push basic income through or gain critical-mass support by using boring, conventional math arguments.
UBI is progressive and daring, not staid and conservative. UBI is today’s true arbiter of the progressive movement, and it’s overshadowed by an absurd amount of strident, intolerant deplatforming that sucks up energy on the far left and gives progressivism a bad name.
One notable challenge is that Joe America is not wired for creativity and innovation. Most people are simply not progressive-minded.
They’re not looking for a protopian transformation to a world where everyone suddenly has choices and agency and isn’t beholden to the biblical “live by the sweat of your brow” edict. It’s too new, too scary for them to imagine, and takes too much research to understand adequately. Easier to just laugh it off as nonsense.
Those who don’t need UBI love to say that work provides meaning. This is, of course, a stupid argument. Bottom line: trust fund kids have great lives; certainly the freedom to design a life how they see fit. Many pursue graduate degrees or cultivate their greatest gifts, even if it’s not immediately a profit generator.
The path to meaning is more likely to be achieved with a UBI, not less likely, as the haves would have you believe.
Worker desperation is a bane of society, and a sign that certain industries maybe don’t really deserve to exist, because absent worker desperation, nobody would work there, because the job and the product is depressing and meaningless.
Cynicism rules the day, but under the surface people DO want things that MATTER, and to use the one or two special talents God gave them. Very few people get to taste the joy of doing what they love and are good at — and most of us have given up hoping. We are a hard-working yet chronically underutilized species.
Hope for a meaningful life needs to be rekindled somehow. With UBI, people will have the freedom to hold out for jobs they care about ideologically and align with emotionally, or take time off to get an education, or hell, just live in a quaint shack somewhere in the country and plant a veggie garden, and just BE.
And aside from all that, the data and science resoundingly supports that people will be both happier AND more productive as a result of a UBI.
Nonetheless, it’s hard to pry open the rigid minds of the conventional majority that rolls its eyes at anything NEW.
People scoff at that which sounds too much like a sci fi movie, even if it’s actually possible.
Many suggest that a conservative streak in average Americans makes them terrified of seeing desperate workers suddenly liberated and able to pursue a more meaningful path. Because if that happens, it puts pressure on all of us to design more meaningful and sustainable pursuits, with no more excuses. It might blur the lines between what counts as virtue, status, and success.
Some people are horrified of that happening, because a built-in excuse to not have to know themselves or find genuine passion in their work has been a comfort for them.
In any case, the UBI campaign should be around how life for most people is like the movie Office Space or worse, a dour dead-end, a lost dream…but that there’s still hope, because UBI gives everyone a new lease on life, a real chance at making this life count, at living your best years on your terms.
Suddenly, dreary black and white lives blossom into colorful possibilities. Dress codes, cubicles and asshole bosses would suffer a fatal blow as beleaguered workers flee to the refuge of minimalistic lives where they at least own their own TIME - arguably life’s most valuable asset.
A brave new generation has the geniune option to forego some luxuries to enjoy freedom and self sovereignty, and a path out of the dead end life, a chance to live authentically and chart the right course, without the death sentence of a $0 balance in your checking account staring you down at the end of each month.
We have to sell the positive vision — this prospect of self-actualization — to the majority of the electorate, make it visceral, psych them up for a country that will be far happier, energized, creative, and more human, as we finally all have the wiggle room to improve our lives, instead of the morose inevitability of numbing ourselves with drugs and TV because the workday is so soul sucking.
If maths are the best argument we have, nobody will be inspired; the public with the power to decide won’t ever bother to actually CHECK the math anyway. Any UBI opponent can use math to make the idea look laughably impossible, largely because most people will glaze over the numbers and don’t check the math. All they hear is the overconfident snark coming from men wearing nice watches.
UBI needs to be positioned as a heart issue, not a head issue. The argument is that it’s a necessity, and that the math will work itself out. Similar to the pandemic stimulus and ACA, UBI is just plain needed, automation will be wiping away entire job sectors, depression and drugs are rampant, and it’s about time the human race received its fair dividend from the thousands of years of sacrifice to get to the point where AI and automation can massively boost labor-less production.
Will we concentrate the infinitely expanding surplus among the few, and keep people working like plough horses? If so, that’s stupid. It’s ugly and wrong, and the majority will not tolerate that for much longer.
And don’t give me your damn math. We’ll make the math work; not only because it does work, but more importantly, because it has to.
"...bad faith framing and confirmation bias... is the act of focusing on some facts and intentionally ignoring others..."
Are fifth columnists confusing the campaign? I think so.
Is that what you have in mind, Galan?
Great polemic (in the best sense of the term). This top-down control system will not yield to deferential requests.
Galan, would you consider engaging the "Responsible Wealth" constituency https://www.responsiblewealth.org/ over there?