Their takeaway? We’re studying the wrong things. We’ve pinned so many hopes to UBI — some of them contradictory — that it’s not clear anymore what concrete empirical results from our pilot programs would help us conclude it’s a good idea. At the same time, proponents typically haven’t characterized their plans in enough detail that we can figure out how to pay for them and how they’ll affect the poor.
That doesn’t necessarily mean UBI is a utopian pipe dream. But it does suggest that, right now, UBI is proposed as a solution to many different social ills, and the details of UBI proposals are often underspecified — so it’s not clear who’d get money, how much, or how we’d pay for it. If we want to fix our welfare system, that has to change. [...]
But other arguments for UBI assume it will decrease the labor supply. The technological unemployment argument, for example, seems to rest on the assumption that UBI will decrease the labor supply — and that this is a good thing. Under this model, UBI is part of how we transition from a society where people need to work to a society where they don’t. Complaining that they won’t get jobs is beside the point.
As the paper spells out, this makes it tricky to evaluate whether UBI programs are living up to expectations. We haven’t decided what problem we want to solve, much less what experimental results we’d see if we’d successfully solved it. [...]
And that’s not the only problem. Eliminating all existing transfer programs in favor of a UBI would leave some big holes. For example, under the UBI they propose, a single parent of three children would be eligible for $12,000 a year in total assistance. Under the current system, that parent would likely be eligible for a lot more: health care through Medicaid, food stamps, rent and housing assistance, and potentially transfer payments through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. “Replacing existing anti-poverty programs with a UBI would be highly regressive,” the paper argues. That’s not what anyone’s going for.
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