Psychology Archipelago
Is UBI Truly the Universal Solution?
In my last post about raising IQ, I talked about how 6.7 million manufacturing jobs have been lost from 1979 to 2019 due to automation. One solution to this, popularized recently by former presidential candidate Andrew Yang is UBI, Universal Basic Income. The basic idea? Give everyone money, unconditionally. Andrew Yang ran on the campaign of 1,000 dollars a month, but the exact amount can differ. UBI could greatly reduce the approximately 40 million people who live under the poverty line in America.
UBI has been implemented in Alaska since 1982, giving 1,000 to 2,000 dollars a year to all residents. Although a far-cry from the proposed 1,000 dollars a month, it has been quite successful on most fronts. While UBI can be a useful economic tool for helping those who are increasingly unable to find jobs that provide for them and their families, I am more interested in the psychological effects. A paper by Damon Jones and Ioana Marinescu from the University of Chicago and Pennsylvania respectively, concluded that UBI has "had no effect on employment" in Alaska. This is a surprising result. After all, if you're getting paid, why should you work? One answer could be that it might incentivize people to find new jobs that they find more interesting, rather than continuing in a dead-end job simply for a sense of security. Taking this into consideration, there is no surprise that UBI has been found to lower stress, increase happiness, and overall improve quality of life.
A recent paper from 2021 reviewing the literature on UBI found that there were clear improvements to mental health including “improved time with family and friends, a reduction in perceived stigma and a renewed sense of hope for the future.” Additionally, from a purely logical perspective UBI is unique from other forms of welfare in that it removes the stigma of welfare. If everyone receives it, no one is viewed differently. This universality has also been proposed to have “stress-reducing benefits for recipients.”
Furthermore, the answer to the question of whether UBI will simply empower people to indulge in more alcohol and other addictive substances seems to be a resounding no. According to a paper from the Roosevelt Institute, UBI was found to improve mental health in a group of Native Americans, making them “significantly less likely to experience alcohol or cannabis use or dependence.” A review of 19 papers found that “the vast majority of estimates” found that expenditure on “temptation goods” went down after implementing UBI.
Unfortunately, despite this evidence, most UBI studies have looked primarily at economic factors, and either ignored mental health or looked at it as a secondary concern. Research into UBI’s effect on mental health is still in its infancy, but the fact remains that the preliminary results are promising to say the least.
This overwhelmingly positive effect on mental health should not surprising. Mental health and poverty have been known to form a vicious cycle. Mental health problems can lead to impoverishment through loss of employment or underemployment, while poverty can “cause poor mental health through social stresses, stigma and trauma.” It makes perfect sense that anything that can break this cycle will have a huge effect on improving mental health.
There is no question that mental health should be a huge concern for everyone. Mental health has continued to worsen over the past decade despite the seemingly ever increasing pace of technological advancement, and hit an all-time high during the pandemic. Given this situation, promising solutions like UBI must be researched more.
Overall, despite the still evolving research on the subject, UBI remains a promising yet seemingly radical policy that could mean improving millions and possibly billions of lives. Given the potential, I believe that there should be more serious discussion on UBI and that these more fringe ideas should be treated more seriously in the mainstream.