This is not nearly as cut-and-dried as you assume. In particular it assumes that "quality of life" is synonymous with what can be measured in economic terms.
Looking at the basic income studies to date, a lot of the quality of life benefits are in areas such as mental health, which usually isn't included in GDP or in economic terms.
The opposing viewpoint is that people derive *meaning* for their lives from responsibility and a job, and when those are taken away, quality of life plunges to zero.
I certainly agree that people can derive meaning from responsibilities and a job. I would argue that basic income makes it more likely that people will derive meaning from their work. If someone's no longer forced to take a low-paying and/or dangerous job just to survive, it's more likely they will find work that's meaningful to them.
Examples for this are not hard to find. We start with various indigenous populations (eg Australia or North America) with constant on-going problems resulting from some level of guaranteed government income but none of the source of meaning that I described. Later this moves on to much of the US black population, and is now starting to become an important source of anomie in the US poor white population.
The challenges that indigenous populations and minorities face are not from occasionally being given small sums of money, but from poverty, often enforced through generations of oppression, marginalization, and exclusion from economic opportunities (the Wikipedia page on
Redlining provides some context for just one of the methods used). The article I linked above cites an example where Native Americans in North Carolina distributed a universal benefit, and there was correlation with "improved education and mental health, and decreased addiction and crime".
Another piece of context is that welfare in the US is means-tested, which can often lead to a
poverty trap where getting a low-paying job leads to the same or less net income. The evidence-based approach is to remove the means-testing, so we get the
poverty-lessening effect of welfare, but people also get the benefit of additional income from work. I know there is a lot of hand-wringing about whether basic income will keep people from working, but again, all the evidence we've seen so far from experiments is that this just doesn't happen; by not worrying as much about survival, people are able to focus on finding the work that's meaningful to them.
Well if giving away money is a reliable way to improve life, maybe instead of spending $2T on infrastructure, the people of the US would be better served by having the government give the money to them.
One shouldn't have to choose between the two. We need infrastructure and, imho, we need to decouple survival from work because we live in a world of increasing automation.
After all, Apple as a private company is not obligated to develop social programs and such, which should be the purview of the government.
Agreed. Again, I am proposing this thought experiment because there is a contrast between the vast, vast sums of money Apple have collected, and the poverty we see in the US. To me, it's not right that Apple — or any corporation — can have so much while so many go without.
By the same token, Apples' $530 billion dollar and the government infrastructure will accomplish the same basic ends. Provide jobs through construction while increasing the quality of the infrastructure in the US.
Unless there is an investigation into the efficacy of Apple's investment, we don't know if private investment will achieve the same ends as public investment. Are the terms of Apple's manufacturing deals public? Will other companies be able to make use of the infrastructure Apple are investing in, or is it primarily for Apple's use? Without proper auditing, all we have to go on are statements from Apple.
Good on Apple. We need more solid companies willing to hire more people. The problem is a lot of today's young people are very lazy and appear to lack personal initiative and motivation, outside of playing on their iPhones.
There are many people in every generation, and we can point to any specific individual to confirm the bias we have about any given generation. Here's an example that shows my bias: Over the course of a week in January 2017,
a bunch of primarily-young people raised over $2 million to cure cancer, the same week that
a bunch of primarily-old people were trying to eliminate health coverage — including cancer treatments — for millions of people. That contrast has stuck with me over the years, and made it harder for me to remember that there are plenty of people older than me who are also working to make things better.
