I appreciate the tonal check in—I very much enjoy conversations like this, and appreciate the effort to maintain a civil and productive discussion. Thank you very much for that effort.

We keep mixing the domain of our discussion; sometimes I'm talking about a hypothetical ideal situation, and sometimes it's a "reasonable" step we could make from the current economic structure. I haven't been clear on when I've been making those distinctions, and will attempt to be better.

I would generally agree that the humanitarian value of a person's life vs the economic value of a person's life are separate concepts, but they are intrinsically related by the fact that in our current system of resource distribution, e.g. capitalistic economy, the humanitarian-value is intrinsically associated with the economic-value.

In my ideal system, this would not be the case, or that association would at least be loosened. I believe we can make some progress towards this ideal in the ‘real world’ through the existence of ‘force multipliers’: Food and housing production have skyrocketed since industrialization. There are similar effects in terms of housing and infrastructure (water, sewer, etc) for a population. I think it is very possible for us, with our current level of industrial output as a species, to feed/clothe/house/whatever the population of the planet.

I do not think it is possible for us to do that with indefinite population growth, to your point:

> What happens when the expense gets so great that it cannot be sustained?

In the maximally-ideal world, the population would self-regulate to stay below the carrying capacity. We see this even now in effects of education suppressing birth rates, so this doesn’t seem like an impossible goal.

In summary,

1. I believe our current technological and industrial capacity would support a UBI-like system for everyone, right now

2. I do not believe that it it would be sustainable to do so with unchecked population growth

3. I do not know what the best real-world avenue to prevent outgrowing the capacities of such a UBI-like system would be, but suspect there are tools we have now (education) that we could explore that may help.

4. The fact that such a UBI-like system would be difficult to impossible in our current economy is not an indictment of the concept of UBI, but of our current system of resource distribution.

Onto the core of our disagreement:

First:

> The population already decides what is best for itself [ ... ]

and second:

> The problem is that such benefits would have the opposite effect, because the thing that most keeps people in poverty is not lack of money, but lack of motivation and lack of options.

I fundamentally disagree on both points.

While the USA does exist in a democratic system, there are many examples where businesses have overpowered the general population, or where those interests have turned groups of the population against each other. As far back as the founding of the US, white businessmen fought to restrict voting power away from the general population, and worked to pit working whites against enslaved blacks. In the Mexican-American war in 1846, business interests sought to clear a path across the continent to California, bulldozing Mexico in the process, using conscripted forces. Recent examples include nuking Japan to secure economic control under the USA, despite strong indications that Japan wanted to surrender, or the false-WMD pretense to invade Iraq for control of the region’s natural resources.

Less extreme but still insidious examples include Citizens United, the slipshod state of campaign finance regulation, or modern tax code being fundamentally friendlier to the ultra-rich than the far larger middle- or lower-classes.

Notably, “the population” is not a homogenous group, and can have flawed reasoning for reasons beyond conspiratorial interference. It’s still clear that “the population” has not been able to “self determine” in many ways, due to the interference of the wealthy elite.

Secondly, I fundamentally disagree that a lack of motivation keeps people in the poverty cycle, and that providing UBI-like benefits would reduce their options.

I find the notion that people exist in poverty due to lack of motivation to be naive at best, and deliberately disingenuous at worst--especially when juxtaposed with the motivations present in the adversarial system that is our economy. Businesses' core interest lies in maximizing profit, which in turn means minimizing cost-of-goods-sold: primarily, labor. This means widening the labor pool as far as possible, limiting the amount paid to labor, and preventing labor from ever gaining real power. To ignore the actions the wealthy elite have taken to achieve those goals and instead blame the poverty cycle on a lack of motivation for those trapped in it is, again, disingenuous.

Are there people who will choose not to put in effort to take advantage of opportunities? Yes. Are there people who will 'exploit' e.g. unemployment benefits when they don't need them? Certainly.

Is motivation the primary reason people exist within the poverty cycle? Absolutely not.

How would those trapped in the poverty cycle work multiple low-paying, high-effort jobs where they have to deal with angry, entitled customers day after day, with little to no opportunity for advancement, and an entire economic system arrayed against them, if not for motivation?. I guarantee you that my middle-school video production teacher, who worked at Lowe's in addition to her job teaching at the worst school in our district, spends more of her time doing 'work' than any of the Walton family.

None of the dozen or so homeless people I see along my walk to work are "unmotivated" to address their situation, or "unwilling" to do work. But how many jobs require an address to run a background check? Or banks to open a checking account? How are they supposed to interview for work when they haven't had access to a shower in days? And that's assuming they're not also dealing with mental health issues, or addiction, or medical issues, or any of a dozen other things that could complicate their life.

There are certainly anecdotes about people who have overcome these circumstances, as there are outliers in any case, but focusing on them and ignoring the majority who cannot escape is a mistake.

> UBI would remove motivation, like any other form of ameliorating their situation would do.

UBI would not remove their motivation to escape from the cycle of poverty; UBI would remove them *from the cycle of poverty.* They are no longer restricted to the maximally-exploitative job you've been hypothesizing, they can go to school, go into construction, decide to become an artist. If their activities end up not being economically-valuable in the capitalistic sense, who cares? So long as we have sufficient people to turn the wheels of the systems the population depends on (which should be trivially easy between the supply of people motivated to do so and a mild incentive to engage in those systems, i.e. a reasonable wage) it doesn't matter what these people choose to do.

> If there was a minimum wage back then, he would not have been able to be hired or hire people himself.

The labor movement of the ~1910s in the US has plenty of examples of where raising the minimum wage--or in some cases, instituting one--in fact did not result in the loss of jobs, but the creation of them, and the ability for people to become more upwardly mobile in terms of socioeconomic status--at the same time that businesses were fighting tooth and nail (literally assaulting strikers and labor group organizers) to prevent people from achieving those gains.

The current state of the wealth inequality divide in the US is testament to there being money available in the system to absorb the cost of an increased minimum wage. See the commonly cited statistic of Denmark having a significantly higher minimum wage than the US, with a nominal rise in the cost of (say) a Big Mac, and with significantly less unemployment than the USA over the last 10 years.

While your grandfather's achievements are remarkable and respectable, they are a poor metric by which to decide that regulations and minimum wages and age limitations on work are problems preventing those trapped in poverty today from improving their standing. Again I'll cite the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire: without regulations and safety standards, you end up with hundreds of people burning to death in preventable circumstances. Or bridges collapsing in high winds. Or children being poisoned by the powders used in textile mills. Or buildings collapsing due to poor structural support. Or cities being poisoned by lead in their water supply pipes.

While I can understand and am aware of circumstances where "regulations" are indeed frivolous and impinge development, I am not convinced that age restrictions and licensing requirements are the core things at fault for others stuck in poverty cycles. The implication that they are somehow at fault is to completely ignore the exploitative nature of the businesses which recklessly endangered their workers--including children!--when they weren't subject to these kinds of regulation.

I suspect your grandfather’s success has more to do with the luck of being poised to enter into the industrial explosion of the time, and your extrapolation that he was able to do so because of the lack of minimum wage, regulation, etc, is simply survivorship bias.