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Vaniver comments on Stupid questions thread, October 2015 - Less Wrong
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Well, UBI will probably eliminate poverty for some definition of "poverty", and not for the new one which will appear soon afterwards. Some people will keep updating the definition to mean "below the (new) average".
But if we taboo the word, we can hope that UBI will remove e.g. starvation. And it will be done without having to employ a greater army of bureaucrats. Maybe the money saved on the unnecessary paperwork will be a significant fraction of the costs for removing starvation.
So if you give me a budget and ask me whether I would rather spend it paying people to create and process unnecessary paperwork or feeding people who starve, I guess the answer is obvious for most people, regardless of their other political opinions.
(Okay, some people would call it a false dilemma, and say we should neither feed the hungry nor pay the bureaucrats, but use the money in some other way; maybe not even collect it. But when you take into account the mainstream opinion, and what choices are realistic, this one is an obvious improvement. Well, depending on technical details, of course.)
There is no starvation in Western countries.
Well, there is some. A better way to put this is something like "there is no starvation left that could be treated by government programs."
So you are saying that there is no starvation that could be treated by government programs, but there is starvation that could be eliminated by UBI?
Errr....
Would UBI be a government program?
I was taking your overbroad and incorrect claim--that no one in Western countries starves--and replacing it with a narrowly targeted claim--that there is no starvation left that can be fixed by government programs. The last time I looked, most starvation was caused by negligence on the part of legal guardians, deliberate self-harm (as in anorexia), or being out of the system (many homeless people have difficulty collecting food stamps). But all three of these issues will still be problems under UBI, and all three of them are being approached by specialized programs that are probably about as effective as one can expect a government program to be.
What other alternatives are there?
Nothing like adding a bit of straw to, erm, fill out the opponent's argument :-P I, of course, did not say "no one". I said "there is no starvation" which, given that we're discussing social programs in the context of society-wide policy proposals like the UBI, means that there is no starvation as a social issue in the West, in particular one which the UBI might fix.
In the same sense I feel justified in saying that there is no slavery in the West, even though I'm sure some individuals are effectively slaves. The social-policy context and the nit-picking context are different.
So, I'll stick with my claim and continue to consider it narrow enough to be correct. Constructing straw extensions to make it incorrect is, of course, always possible.
Certain altcoins, like uCoin, purport to be a kind of currency with built in nongovernmental UBI.
Huh? UBI is, basically, an unconditional grant of economic value. Moreover, it's guaranteed to be there next month. You don't get to create economic value out of thin air (and guarantee it will be there next month) just by making another altcoin.
UBI means every citizen gets a sum of money in their account each month. Current government programs means people need to jump through multiple hoops in order to get food. I don't think UBI is a panacea, but I don't think it's a stretch to say it'll reach people who aren't being helped by the current welfare systems.
Not perfectly true in Britain, as far as I can tell. Families are using food banks in masses, and one kid got scurvy as I recall.