This is not a typical SRS post. I don’t know who funds this organisation or who these researchers are but this particular research seems well meaning. That being said the “startup mentality” thing is incredibly weird. Even their website look like a tech company’s. Maybe they wanted to convince the techbro cohort that the riff-raff do not spend extra income on drugs and booze and thought this to be an effective measure.
This research seems to be testing the waters for UBI. What I don’t understand is that this does not really look like some sort of revelation. People were given a significant amount of money for free and their lives, generally speaking, improved. Is this really something that they had to bring their startup mentality to the table for?
The dictatorship of the bourgeois aims to transfer wealth from proletariats to the bourgeois, and not the other way around.
Doubling wages and reducing the working week is a no-brainer when your aim is to actually improve the conditions of the masses. It solves unemployment for an ever-increasing population, and helps people get out of poverty. The “problem” is that it is essentially a transfer of wealth from the capitalists to the workers, so talking about it in policy-making circles is essentially prohibited. And any current attempts to implement it are hampered by consciously-made bad design.
So instead, we get this push for UBI, which primarily aims to replace talk of increasing wages/reducing working hours. It seemingly achieves the same thing, but in reality it is just a repackage of previous bad capitalist ideas, like tip culture, social welfare for low-paid workers, etc. The source of funding for UBI is taxation, and the burden of taxation primarily falls on workers. So, the workers are basically going to be paying themselves, and the capitalists will now have an excuse to reduce wages even further. In addition, UBI aims to replace social welfare by rolling all the different subsidies into one thing. Meaning, the workers will gain nothing.
What UBI really is, is a redistribution of wealth, but only between the working class. It does not touch capital. Instead, it actually increases capital by giving the lower strata of workers the funds to be more valuable consumers for the capitalists, maintaining a large pool of unemployed people, and giving capitalists the excuse to lower wages even further.
Agreed, just bourgeois welfare in disguise.