I wonder what Karl Marx would have thought about UBI if he lived today. I'm no Marx scholar, but his version of communism seems to me to have envisioned a UBI as a starting point, a way to ameliorate scarcity (to each according to his needs), whereas someone like Andrew Yang sees a UBI as a "dividend," a way to share abundance. Thing is, when Marx was writing, things were scarce, and now, at least arguably, things are not. So how would Marx's brain have responded?

Even now, a great tension exists in the UBI biz between those who see it as a way to end poverty and those who see it as the natural distribution of community-derived wealth - the product of civil society participating in a sufficiently non-corrupt public project - which, happily indeed, reduces poverty among the people. It's as if one said to Marx, "We will give to each according to his politically determined needs only after we can give enough to each according to his market-valued contribution."

The dividend-style UBI, which I support, assumes abundance, not scarcity, and it assumes productivity gains sufficient to offset the loss of labor participation. I have to assume that serious thinkers worked on the Wharton study (I am a Penn grad), but, as reported, the assumptions about financing seem too rigid. I would expect the UBI to be "financed" by increased income tax revenues arising from taxing the UBI under our usual progressive tax scheme (it's a dividend, and we tax dividends) and increased business activity, and by monetization. https://remarklj.medium.com/how-do-you-pay-for-a-ubi-451a5cb505f4

I don't see crowding out of capital as a problem. Rather, I see heightened demand bringing forth more production, as Mr. Khare-Arora describes in the article.

The UBI only works if there is a negative output gap - i.e., if we can produce much more stuff at little marginal cost, as described in "The Zero Marginal Cost Society," by Jeremy Rifkin, another Penn grad, BTW. The size of the output gap is a fact of life that changes with technology, so generalizations that do not take into account the current and anticipated state of the productive arts cannot possibly tell us anything really useful about the UBI.