It's good to see studies that support basic income, hopefully they will make the idea more popular too. I think that, if basic income is feasible (I don't know enough about economy to know if it can be done on a large scale), then it really should be implemented, because it would improve people's lives in so many different ways.
If basic income gets successfully implemented on the scale of entire countries, then a system without it will be seen as barbaric, with the poverty and stress it causes.
It can be implemented...However, the things countries need to watch out for are certain tipping points with regards to
- inflation,
- the consumer pricing index for certain goods and services
Just as a simple example, if you look at the aspect of housing/rent (one of the largest expenditures for most Americans). Landlords tend to price their units in such a way that they charge the most they possibly can, and still keep all of the units full without too many vacancies.
So pretend I have a block of apartments, and I'm currently charging $900/month for them (because that's what the market with bear...if I take it up to $1000, too many people can't afford it anymore or don't feel the apartments are worth that much, and I end up with empty units that I'm losing money on). If everyone gets a check in the mail for $500/month...I could easily jack that price up because now I know more people can, and would be willing to pay more for it now that they have extra money in their pocket.
However, the renter wouldn't really be much better off in that scenario...
As a person with a $1800/month net income (paying $900/month for rent), isn't really better off than a person with a $1800/month + $500 UBI (paying $1400/month for rent).
The only way to avert that side-effect would be to have rent control policies in place, but those have a history of creating an entirely different set of issues.
The top cities in the country that implement those policies happen to share a huge amount of overlap with the cities that A) were on the top 10 homelessness rate list, and B) cities that have had their homelessness problem dramatically increase over the past 20 years.
I would say a UBI is doable, but only if the area that's implementing it doesn't have the issue of housing shortages. ...you can't really do UBI without rent control, and rent control tends to exacerbate the issue of housing shortages in areas that are dealing with that problem.
If you have an area that currently has a big housing surplus (and there are landlords desperately trying to fill units at a price where they're not going to lose money on it), then a UBI would probably work out. However, in an area where there are literally waiting lists to be able to get an apartment, a $500 UBI check every month equates to an instant increase in rent prices because from a landlords perspective "I have thousands of people dying to get an apartment in this area, and I know they're all getting and extra $500 a month now, so I'm going to raise rent prices accordingly"