Universal basic income would work in practice

Every UBI pilot you've read about has the same fatal flaw as evidence: it was a pilot. Recipients knew the money would stop. They behaved like people receiving a temporary windfall, not like people whose entire labour-economic incentives had changed for the rest of their lives.

A real UBI — universal, permanent, large enough to live on — has no real-world precedent because it has never been tried. What we do have is a lot of evidence about what happens to communities when the link between work and income weakens at the margins (welfare cliffs, disability rolls, oil-state rentier economies). The pattern is consistent and unhappy: declining labour-force participation, weakening social bonds, eroding sense of purpose. None of these are solved by money.

The productive version of this conversation is about replacing the means-tested welfare maze with a negative income tax or a job guarantee. UBI sounds simple because nobody has had to operate one at scale.