The American Interest isn’t impressed with proposals for a “universal basic income” approach to welfare, particularly as a means of adjusting for a changing economy:

It’s easy to see why this idea is appealing to Silicon Valley technologists, to economic policy wonks, to citizens of rationalia. It satisfies fully the demands of what Shadi Hamid has called “chart-based” liberalism, with its homo economicus model of human behavior. Globalized capitalism is exacerbating inequality and squeezing jobs outside of metropolitan centers? The capitalist winners can just pay off the losers with a UBI and go about their merry way. The price of long-term social peace is just a slightly higher marginal tax rate; the rest of our economic model can remain untouched.

The post goes on to make the point that people don’t just want money.  We also want the “dignity and meaning” of work and a productive role in our society.

This ties back to things I’ve written about the topic.  If we’re looking at a UBI as a means of handling economic change, we’re actually hindering economic change.  We’d be preventing our society from adjusting to its new reality in a way that fosters human fulfillment.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that we value art (which I do, personally).  A fanciful leftist might think that providing displaced workers with a baseline income might give them space to pursue higher callings — their productive dreams.  But experience shows that that isn’t really the case.  Our society is much, much wealthier and better endowed with free time than has ever been the case in human history.  Are non-workers or part-time workers gathering together in writers’ groups or hosting middle-of-the-day public debates on political philosophy?

Not that I’ve seen.  One might see, however, people who make a living, or who have reasonable prospects of doing so, at these activities participating in those workday events.  And if people are being paid, it’s a marker that society values the thing that they are doing.  A UBI might be a signal that we value the individuals (to some paltry extent), but in an impersonal way.

We would do better to accept the growing pains as people have to find new ways to earn a living and as companies benefiting from technology are forced to lower their prices in accord with the savings that automation gets them on producing their products.  If we use government to stop these adjustments, we implicitly keep prices and profits high in certain sectors of the economy artificially.

What I suspect we will find is that the people who still have money when the dust has settled will value higher-order products, like human-created art.  (I’d expand that, by the way, to include things like more-elaborate craftsmanship in regular construction trades, which I always found to be the most fun and rewarding projects as a carpenter.)  That, in turn, will grow the market for the very things we stipulated above that we value and lead to more human fulfillment and beauty, not less.