A German experiment has found that people are likely to continue working full-time even if they receive no-strings-attached universal basic income payments.
Archived version: https://archive.is/20250412140637/https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/11/health/germany-universal-basic-income-study-intl-scli-wellness/index.html
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Okay, humour me. Everyone suddenly gets $100 per month. Now, some big grocery chain knows that every single one of those customers has an extra $100. What do you expect to happen? They’ll be like, “cool people will buy more stuff” or they’ll be like “that’s an extra $100 we can extract by making the most common things people buy more expensive,” which do you think is more likely?
I’ll humor this, even though I’m tired of answering this same question. I’ll do you a favor and give you the short version, first: Inflation has nothing to do with how currency is distributed and everything to do with the supply of currency in circulation. Now that we’ve established the basic concept, let’s break some of it down. If there’s $100 in circulation, it doesn’t matter if one person has all of it, or 100 people have $1. The value of $1 is the same. If $1000 is in circulation, then $100 is worth less than if only $100 is in circulation, even if one person has $901 and everyone else has $1. Why is this so difficult to understand? Why do you believe that money is somehow worth more if its distribution is unequal? If people buy more stuff, that’s called a healthy economy. If people buy ‘too much milk and the prices go up’ then someone will sell milk for less to undercut the competition in a healthy economic system. If you can’t sell it for less, you innovate. If you can’t innovate, or sell for less, then you can’t compete and you lose. Everyone being able to afford more milk doesn’t cause $1 to be worth less. Of course, this example isn’t realistic anymore, but that’s due to capitalism failing – the underlying principals of the example still hold true.
The problem is in markets with little to no real competition. So, housing. But really that is a separate problem that also should be fixed and could be but for some reason is apparently politically unpopular to do so.
We literally fixed this exact problem before.
If there’s only one grocery store, maybe. But that’s a monopoly, and that’s going to be shit no matter what. Ideally you have multiple grocery stores that compete, and if one raises prices the other will take their customers. (If they all coordinate to raise their prices, that’s a cartel and that’s also bad.)
So you’re not really exposing a problem with UBI, but rather with unregulated capitalism.
We live in a real world, not a hypothetical scenario. There are multiple stores and they’re all either in a cartel or just blindly copying each other in extracting the maximum value out of their customers.
This brings them more money, they pump more into marketing and voilà, only the shitty stores remain. If a newcomer joins, you can enjoy a few pretty good years until they inevitably join the shitty cartel or cease to exist.
So yeah, that’s a problem of capitalism but that doesn’t mean it’s not a problem preventing UBI actually ever being implemented.
But we’ve already seen this without UBI. So worst case, nothing changes. Best case? There’s more opportunity for change.
I don’t think “This other, largely unrelated, problem is bad so we shouldn’t do this thing” is good reasoning.
I don’t think in the real world, in all places (or even most places) all the stores are in a cartel. Where I live, there are several large supermarkets and a handful of smaller groceries all within walking distance. They are not a cartel. They compete. You’re just making stuff up for some weird dark fantasy of yours.
Furthermore, if there was a monopoly, and we have the political might to implement UBI, I dare say we’d also have the political power to do a tried-and-true popular move of breaking up monopolies.