> This is hard to respond to without resorting to cultural reductionism, but there are many societies in which economic advancement beyond the means of a comfortable middle class life is not highly valued by everyone.
A UBI that is economically viable, even internally in a developed country, in the near term would struggle to replace more than some subset of existing poverty support programs with something with less perverse incentives (particularly, by reducing the disincentive to additional income -- and the incentive for any additional income to be "off the books" income -- for those on the poverty support programs.)
We're a long way from anything like being able to support a "comfortable middle class life" (even if by that, you actually mean something like a middle income lifestyle in a typical developed nation, which is more working class than middle class.)
> In developing economies in general you often have a lot of people who have just gotten out of absolute poverty -- in a few generations their descendants may think differently, but they are often grateful enough that they can feed themselves and advancement beyond that is a pretty distant concern.
Even in developed nations, it will be a few generations before a UBI that can supply "a comfortably middle class life" would be viable.
A UBI that is economically viable, even internally in a developed country, in the near term would struggle to replace more than some subset of existing poverty support programs with something with less perverse incentives (particularly, by reducing the disincentive to additional income -- and the incentive for any additional income to be "off the books" income -- for those on the poverty support programs.)
We're a long way from anything like being able to support a "comfortable middle class life" (even if by that, you actually mean something like a middle income lifestyle in a typical developed nation, which is more working class than middle class.)
> In developing economies in general you often have a lot of people who have just gotten out of absolute poverty -- in a few generations their descendants may think differently, but they are often grateful enough that they can feed themselves and advancement beyond that is a pretty distant concern.
Even in developed nations, it will be a few generations before a UBI that can supply "a comfortably middle class life" would be viable.