UBI Would Likely Increase Poverty Rather Than Reduce It (2019)
This is a very hard problem to solve. The issue is not just the money and wealth itself but the power to control its flow. You can arbitrarily distribute the money but there are so many gatekeepers deep inside of the societal structure who&#x27;re going to squeeze as much as possible from the policy <i>and</i> they have enough power to do that. For instance, you give 1000 bucks to everyone? Then landlords will increase the rent by 800~900 bucks.<p>While I still think that UBI can be quite a useful tool to solve poverty problems, this is not a silver bullet and has its own caveats. We still need to understand how those powers are working in practice and handle them one by one. Otherwise, this could be easily repurposed into a tool to reinforce the established power structure.