Vague UBI ineffective—businesses and rulers exploit ambiguity
Juliana Uhuru Bidadanure 19, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University, “The Political Theory of Universal Basic Income,” Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 22, no. 1, 2019, pp. 481–501
We would benefit from more clarity on the assumed theory of change when advocating for UBI (or arguing against it). In “A Capitalist Road to Communism,” Van der Veen & Van Parijs (1986) attempted to indicate how we might progress to a just society through UBI. There are many potential routes from here to there, so this is an area where more work would be helpful. In an interesting recent contribution to this discussion, Gourevitch & Stanczyk (2018) worry that UBI proponents may be getting things backward—that the kind of UBI we would be able to get without organized labor would be too low. To think that the ruling and business class will simply acquiesce to an ambitious version of the proposal is naïve; it comes down to believing that they will consent to their own expropriation. The left, the authors argue, should refocus its priorities on rebuilding the labor movement.