Alt causes comparatively outweigh the link

Certainly, if the UBI does tighten the labor market, it would not be the single culprit. There are a lot of other forces that have tightened the labor market and put upward pressure on wages in various sectors. But they have been implemented nonetheless because the good that comes from them is thought to override the potential harms of a tighter labor market. One such example is credentialing. In several fields that have become professionalized over the years, in the name of quality assurance, communities have put in place rigorous licensing or certification requirements for practicing certain professions. Clearly, there are reasons why this has been done—you want to know that the doctor who is going to operate on you is someone who has passed a medical licensing exam. But licensing has crept into several professions, and the arguments for needing a board certified physician might not be as clearly applicable to all the various professions for which one must now become credentialed, such as law, real estate, accounting, social work, nursing, architecture, etc. For argument’s sake, let us grant that these licensing and/or certification requirements are necessary. The impact that they have, perhaps intentional, perhaps not, is that they make these professions more exclusive. In other words, more individuals might enter these fields if there were not these rigorous entry hurdles to overcome. Thus, the available labor pool in these fields will shrink, and there will be an upward pressure on wages for the employers of this specific workforce, thereby increasing the costs consumers will face who require these services. And the trend in professional credentialing continues to be on the rise as the general public increasingly demands mechanisms for ensuring quality, led by government or credentialing bodies, to signal that service providers have met a benchmark standard of competence. No matter the original intent, the consequence is that employers of workers in these occupational titles increasingly will have to pay higher wages both to hire them, and to retain them. “Jobs, jobs jobs!” This popular political rallying cry is a second culprit for a tighter labor market. Politicians so often focus on the necessity of creating more jobs in order to grow the economy. But more jobs results in a higher job-to-worker ratio, which, in turn, puts upward pressure on wages. There has been some coverage in the press about the emergence of a tighter labor market in recent months in certain sectors of the economy that lends credence to this idea (Steinhauer, 2018; Casselman, 2018). [1] More importantly, society aspires to grow the economy in order to create more jobs in order to increase wages for workers—this is the goal, not some negative outcome to be avoided. It is important to point out in the UBI debate that an upward pressure on wages is not, in and of itself, a terrible outcome, and, in fact, may very well be a desirable one. In fact, in the two articles cited above, the reporters point to employers who are getting quite creative in their strategies both to recruit and retain workers, offering benefits such as health insurance, paid time off, and flexible work schedules, and even offering employment opportunities to those who heretofore have found it challenging to find jobs, such as ex-offenders, young people, people with criminal records, people with disabilities, people with shoddy work histories, women, minorities, the formerly homeless, ex-addicts, those with no high school diploma, to name a few. Some employers are increasingly hiring workers who don’t have any prior work experience, let alone any industry-specific work experience, and offering them on-the-job training. In some instances, employers are even offering tuition reimbursement so that workers can go to school or wipe out past tuition debt. If a UBI has a similar effect, perhaps that would not be a catastrophe.