There's a lot of strawmanning in the attacks on UBI, and it's worth sorting out what is and isn't actually involved in the case for it, perhaps even "steelmanning" it a bit.
AUTOMATION:
I don't know of any serious advocates of UBI who claim we are facing massive drops in total employment because "robots are taking all the jobs!" (Yes, that's a fringe cry, and maybe a long-term SF-level worry, but not this century.) Instead, the worry is that automation will take over a variety of skilled tasks, making a ton of human capital obsolete, and that our current system for handling unemployment is designed for cyclical and frictional unemployment, but not for permanent displacement.
This is not just an automation issue. Whole categories of jobs can vanish because of globalization or because of other kinds of technological change. Whether it's AI, solar panels, or just better trade routes doesn't matter much. We've not had much success in turning coal miners into programmers, and the same will be true of long-haul truckers if self-driving trucks displace them. Right now, people whose jobs have vanished may be able to fall back on a patchwork of government programs, but they often fall through the holes in the net and get nothing when UI runs out. A UBI would put a guaranteed floor under their income, giving them the time and security to learn new skills and find permanent work without facing complete destitution. Just knowing you and your family won't starve is worth a lot.
COST:
"Krugman is probably right about the $1000-a-month “Freedom Dividend” that Yang proposed during his 2020 presidential campaign. $3 trillion a year is 15% of GDP and about 62% of the current federal budget. That would require either enormous, burdensome tax increases, deep cuts to other spending, or explosive deficits on a scale far beyond anything that has been seen before — and all to provide a cash benefit not nearly big enough to replace a job."
I believe you and Krugman are both wrong about the cost issue. Not just a little bit wrong, but wildly off the mark, to the point where these arguments read like a bad faith caricature. Forget the cartoon version of the UBI. No one realistically believes we are going to add $3 trillion in taxes and spending to the Federal budget! Yeah, I know that's the cartoon, bumper sticker version of the UBI that is often tossed around on social media, but that's not how it would work.
Instead of just attacking the cartoon, you need to consider the very realistic ways a UBI could be done. It can't just be bolted onto the existing tax/welfare kludge. It has to be part of a fundamental redesign of the system (which is way overdue for many reasons).
Conceptually, think of it this way:
Step 1: Convert nearly all tax deductions into tax credits. The personal and standard deductions become a credit. Things like donations and mortgage interest generate a tax credit (e.g., 15%), not a deduction. Actual costs of doing business continue to be deductible, but almost everything else is converted to a credit. (This is much fairer anyway. Why should there be a bigger subsidy for the rich than the poor when making a political donation or paying a mortgage?)
Step 2: Set the minimum tax credit to $1k/adult/mo and $300/child/mo and make it refundable.
Step 3: Adjust the tax brackets so most people pay about what they would have paid before.
Step 4: Count the UBI as income for welfare eligibility purposes. This would dramatically reduce the number of people eligible for many existing welfare programs, like food stamps and the EITC. Programs that become entirely redundant can be dropped.
Doing it this way means that the increase in expenditure is only at the very bottom end, and the relatively small increase in taxes is spread across the rest of the population. The biggest losers would be wealthy people who take very large non-business deductions.
So it's really a negative income tax, but without the cliff. The "clawback" is embedded in the usual tax brackets. (As Milton Friedman demonstrated, any NIT can be converted to a UBI and vice versa.)
That's just a sketch of the baseline. If we're going to do serious reform anyway, we might as well fix a lot of the other defects in the system. We have somewhere between $400 billion and $1 trillion a year in uncollected taxes every year, and the reason is not just underenforcement. It's the incredible complexity of the existing system. Reforming it would let us collect a lot of those unpaid taxes. It would also benefit the entire economy by removing the incentives for twisty tax deals that make no economic sense.
• fix the financial death spiral in many poor communities
• greatly improve equity in school funding
• increase productivity and GDP growth
... while keeping top tax rates below 40%, reducing the corporate tax rate, reducing the deficit, and coming very close to balancing the budget in normal years.
In short, a UBI is not just "affordable." It is entirely possible to build an efficient pro-growth tax/welfare system that incorporates a UBI and is still much MORE affordable than the current system.
Yang's housing policy pitch says he supports "allowing communities to lead the charge in creating rezoning and development plans so that communities maintain their identity while expanding our affordable housing stock". That's pretty wishy-washy. It's surprising that someone who leans so hard into the geek stereotype isn't a full-throated YIMBY.
Yang's a better choice than Stringer or Wiley but if your issue is affordable housing, you'll still want to vote Kathryn Garcia on first preference, and probably Eric Adams on second.
The historical symmetry of the first UBI-supporting mayoral candidate for NYC in 140 years is pretty interesting; from a practical perspective what do you think though? LVT seems like something that could fund UBI, and economists seem to love it as a policy, but what are the politics? It seems like entrenched real estate interests have a lot of power, and that aside I don't know what Yang himself thinks of the idea on the merits.
I don't think he's using fear of automation to sell UBI. I think he's using UBI to soothe fears about automation. That's behind a lot of the support for UBI among Silicon Valley folks - these are people who automate things for a living and want to keep doing that. But they don't want to feel like they're dooming the people whose jobs they're automating.
Also, if automation makes humans obsolete, then of course we can afford a UBI, in real terms. Where are all those robot-provided goods and services going to go, if not to those humans?
On Yang’s UBI plan: on the one hand, this plan is somehow targeted to only the people with the greatest need (how?), while the study and the other research you mention are for true unconditional benefits, i.e. no link to your current employment status. How does it avoid the “benefit trap” problem where getting a job would take you off the not-so-UBI?
Yang is wrong in his justification for UBI, but he should keep on campaigning on it.
It seems to me that many conservative Americans do not care about poverty reduction for they see poor people as "losers" and the rest as "winners". And that's like half the country.
They do, however, care about automation. Everyone recognizes that automation is not the fault of the unemployed.
Doesn't the fact that he didn't surround himself with any PhD's say something? Aren't we, "who we surround ourselves with?" I'm all for good guys, but if someone can't even build a good team for himself and he ran for president and now he's running for the mayor's office in one of the most powerful cities in the world, doesn't this say something? I like a lot of the things this article says, but BdB has been a disaster for NYC, and progressivism now has an ally in Biden and his administration. Are "we" sure that we want bet the house on Andrew Yang? I'm not convinced. At this point, I would not.
I probably only agree with half of Yang's proposals but the ones I agree with are really, really good ideas. At very least he is dramatically widening the Overton Window on the left.
You rejected MMT recently, presumably because of the inflation concern; yet MMT proposes the sovereign currency-issuing government faces an inflation limit, NOT a budgetary limit.
In other words, the limit to TOTAL spending, whether in the private or public sector, is the economy's productivity and availability of resources. [I will leave aside in this post how treasury, as opposed to the free market, can actually determine that limit].
Re robots: with increasing productivity, the sovereign currency-issuing government COULD reduce everyone's working hours while maintaining or increasing incomes, in conjunction with a Job Guarantee which ensures everyone can participate in the economy as best suited to the nation's needs, and be paid above poverty wages, whether in the public or private sectors.
Note,: Germany, Japan and China are all manufacturing nations, unlike the US, so productivity and employment will be more correlated in those nations than in the US (which is not to say the US shouldn't automate ASAP).
Krugman of course, a neo-liberal/neo-Keynesian economist (which has nothing to do with Keynes) will bang on about government debt and deficits: any advice he might have for Yang is useless.
Fact is: free markets are subject to market failure in many areas of the economy; and your assertion that Trump achieved close to full employment and rising living standards for low paid workers is a myth. That 3.7% unemployment figure (before the pandemic hit) is mainstream statistical fiction; un + underemployment + those who have given up looking, was closer to 10%, a disaster for those affected (and this was the best Trump achieved).
Re the UBI, yes it's too expensive under current treasury/central bank arrangements, though MMT could pay for welfare ("sit down money") to the extent is is required at all, which would be minimal if a Job Guarantee was in place:
In her book : 'The case for a Job Guanatee', " Pavlina Tcherneva proposes a job guarantee program in the US which would employ 11m people at a $15/hour standard wage in green care and conservation sector jobs. The US minimum wage is thereby automatically doubled to $15/hour. The program is deliberately countercyclical so that the job goes when the economy rebounds (p19,49). Her proposal creates economic growth valued at millions of dollars ..."
And here is James K. Galbraith on the baleful effects of central bankers who are indoctrinated in neoliberal free-market orthodoxy:
"As anyone who has ever been responsible for legislative oversight of central bankers knows, they do not like to have their authority challenged. Most of all, they will defend their mystique—that magical aura that hovers over their words, shrouding a slushy mix of banality and baloney in a mist of power and jargon".
The baloney being that currency-issuing governments are limited by public debt and deficits.
‘Their main methodology is to go around asking engineers what kind of existing jobs they could make a machine to do; naturally the engineers say they could replace a lot of stuff. But even if the engineers are right, they’re actually talking about replacing tasks, not replacing jobs; the two are very different. As job tasks get replaced, the same humans might be able to spend their time doing more productive stuff — they’re still employed, and they get paid more (or get paid the same but have more leisure time). Meanwhile, mass automation will increase society’s income, which will increase labor demand and create whole new categories of jobs that these studies don’t even try to think about.
So the studies are useless’.
The lump of labour fallacy. Labour reductions in agriculture replaced by manufacturing, in manufacturing by services. But it may yet, though not yet, prove to be that AI +robotics is qualitatively different in replacing jobs not just tasks. You may have normalcy bias that failed you in predicting the implications of Covid. The inevitability of an income increase resulting in increased labour demand may proves false for this time. That income maybe invested in reducing labour demand as a component of the production of goods and services, not in as yet un-imagined ‘whole new categories of jobs’ beyond goods or services. I.e there’s no economic law preventing productivity rising faster than GDP, and reducing overall labour demand.
To your point on automation/robots eliminating tasks rather than jobs, it may not yet be creating unemployment, but it's already creating underemployment. The replacement of middle-class-salary-and-benefits manufacturing jobs with Amazon-warehouse-style gigwork as the primary option for Americans without college degree is still due, to a significant extent, to automation. If you employ 100 people to do the same set of things and someone invents a robot that can do 60% of the tasks in that set, you'll probably let 60 of them go.
A robust social safety net, whether through UBI or otherwise, would help these displaced workers either reeducate themselves, start their own businesses, or simply be in a better economic position to say no to crappy gigwork jobs that come along. And if enough employees in an area are able to, at least for a while, say no to the new crappy gigwork warehouse, the working conditions will have to improve to attract the work.
Of the three populists that ran in 2020, Trump blamed the economic woes of the Rust Belt on immigrants, Bernie on corporations and lack of social safety net, and Yang on robots (and lack of social safety net). Trump was wrong, Bernie was right but too general; I think Yang was actually right on the money
I see your point that Yang needs technocratic advisors but I don't think it makes sense to do that as a politician. Right now, his goal is to get elected, so why spend time on those kinds of details?
I'm not sold yet on Yang or any of the candidates. What I like most about him is that he's an outsider so there's some chance he could challenge our very powerful construction mafia, which has our current mayor and council and all our "machine democrats" securely in its pocket.
What I don't like is that Yang doesn't seem to really know the housing situation here very well. It's really too complicated to treat well in a blog comment. We have two big problems. First is the phoniness of the program that gives financial incentives to builders in return for setting aside some low-rent apartments (which in some areas are actually market rent, and in valuable areas are awarded to the least needy, sometimes even corruptly - e.g. entry-level machine politicians have been given priority to some buildings). Second is NYCHA, which the city is massively committed to but has been one disaster after another, especially its intentional isolation of mostly black people in places like Far Rockaway and Throgs Neck and Brownsville that are difficult to commute from and where resignation and hopelessness hang heavy in the air (and because the US government subsidizes NYCHA, they won't give Section 8 in New York as long as those least-in-demand projects have empty apartments). Yang's plans seem more rhetorical and idealistic than informed and realistic.
Yang is front-runner now merely by name recognition plus outsider status. To win he'll need to study up and get his fingers dirty.
To UBI or not to UBI isn't really a question for a mayor. I think one has to look at all of income redistribution holistically. In my opinion the problem with our present system is that as one moves up the income ladder from no-income to lower-middle-income ones sees very little additional take-home pay. We want to ensure everyone is fed and sheltered and educated, but we have done so in a way that removes much of the financial incentive to better one's plight, while on one hand discriminating against people in employment and policing and on the other chiding them for lacking a sense of civic duty. UBI is meant to restore some of that financial incentive, but whether it actually does or not depends on how UBI is funded.
Just wanted to say to everyone: this is such a high quality comments section! Well done us.
I agree on Ioana Marinescu. See Andrew Yang Isn’t Doing His Signature Policy Right https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/opinion/andrew-yang-ubi-nyc-mayor.html) | Bryce Covert
There's a lot of strawmanning in the attacks on UBI, and it's worth sorting out what is and isn't actually involved in the case for it, perhaps even "steelmanning" it a bit.
AUTOMATION:
I don't know of any serious advocates of UBI who claim we are facing massive drops in total employment because "robots are taking all the jobs!" (Yes, that's a fringe cry, and maybe a long-term SF-level worry, but not this century.) Instead, the worry is that automation will take over a variety of skilled tasks, making a ton of human capital obsolete, and that our current system for handling unemployment is designed for cyclical and frictional unemployment, but not for permanent displacement.
This is not just an automation issue. Whole categories of jobs can vanish because of globalization or because of other kinds of technological change. Whether it's AI, solar panels, or just better trade routes doesn't matter much. We've not had much success in turning coal miners into programmers, and the same will be true of long-haul truckers if self-driving trucks displace them. Right now, people whose jobs have vanished may be able to fall back on a patchwork of government programs, but they often fall through the holes in the net and get nothing when UI runs out. A UBI would put a guaranteed floor under their income, giving them the time and security to learn new skills and find permanent work without facing complete destitution. Just knowing you and your family won't starve is worth a lot.
COST:
"Krugman is probably right about the $1000-a-month “Freedom Dividend” that Yang proposed during his 2020 presidential campaign. $3 trillion a year is 15% of GDP and about 62% of the current federal budget. That would require either enormous, burdensome tax increases, deep cuts to other spending, or explosive deficits on a scale far beyond anything that has been seen before — and all to provide a cash benefit not nearly big enough to replace a job."
I believe you and Krugman are both wrong about the cost issue. Not just a little bit wrong, but wildly off the mark, to the point where these arguments read like a bad faith caricature. Forget the cartoon version of the UBI. No one realistically believes we are going to add $3 trillion in taxes and spending to the Federal budget! Yeah, I know that's the cartoon, bumper sticker version of the UBI that is often tossed around on social media, but that's not how it would work.
Instead of just attacking the cartoon, you need to consider the very realistic ways a UBI could be done. It can't just be bolted onto the existing tax/welfare kludge. It has to be part of a fundamental redesign of the system (which is way overdue for many reasons).
Conceptually, think of it this way:
Step 1: Convert nearly all tax deductions into tax credits. The personal and standard deductions become a credit. Things like donations and mortgage interest generate a tax credit (e.g., 15%), not a deduction. Actual costs of doing business continue to be deductible, but almost everything else is converted to a credit. (This is much fairer anyway. Why should there be a bigger subsidy for the rich than the poor when making a political donation or paying a mortgage?)
Step 2: Set the minimum tax credit to $1k/adult/mo and $300/child/mo and make it refundable.
Step 3: Adjust the tax brackets so most people pay about what they would have paid before.
Step 4: Count the UBI as income for welfare eligibility purposes. This would dramatically reduce the number of people eligible for many existing welfare programs, like food stamps and the EITC. Programs that become entirely redundant can be dropped.
Doing it this way means that the increase in expenditure is only at the very bottom end, and the relatively small increase in taxes is spread across the rest of the population. The biggest losers would be wealthy people who take very large non-business deductions.
So it's really a negative income tax, but without the cliff. The "clawback" is embedded in the usual tax brackets. (As Milton Friedman demonstrated, any NIT can be converted to a UBI and vice versa.)
That's just a sketch of the baseline. If we're going to do serious reform anyway, we might as well fix a lot of the other defects in the system. We have somewhere between $400 billion and $1 trillion a year in uncollected taxes every year, and the reason is not just underenforcement. It's the incredible complexity of the existing system. Reforming it would let us collect a lot of those unpaid taxes. It would also benefit the entire economy by removing the incentives for twisty tax deals that make no economic sense.
If you want to look at a detailed example, this is a good place to start: "Tax and Welfare Reform." https://deepsystems.wordpress.com/rethinking-america/chapter-17/
It outlines a system that would...
• eliminate poverty as we know it
• provide universal health insurance
• fix the financial death spiral in many poor communities
• greatly improve equity in school funding
• increase productivity and GDP growth
... while keeping top tax rates below 40%, reducing the corporate tax rate, reducing the deficit, and coming very close to balancing the budget in normal years.
In short, a UBI is not just "affordable." It is entirely possible to build an efficient pro-growth tax/welfare system that incorporates a UBI and is still much MORE affordable than the current system.
Yang's housing policy pitch says he supports "allowing communities to lead the charge in creating rezoning and development plans so that communities maintain their identity while expanding our affordable housing stock". That's pretty wishy-washy. It's surprising that someone who leans so hard into the geek stereotype isn't a full-throated YIMBY.
Yang's a better choice than Stringer or Wiley but if your issue is affordable housing, you'll still want to vote Kathryn Garcia on first preference, and probably Eric Adams on second.
Ugh, Noah. Yang's "New York UBI" is neither "universal" nor "basic" nor an "income".
I saw this tweet by Scott from SlateStarCodex/AstralCodexTen:
https://twitter.com/slatestarcodex/status/1383512682234449923
Presumably related to the Progress & Poverty review by one of his readers he just posted:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progress-and-poverty
The historical symmetry of the first UBI-supporting mayoral candidate for NYC in 140 years is pretty interesting; from a practical perspective what do you think though? LVT seems like something that could fund UBI, and economists seem to love it as a policy, but what are the politics? It seems like entrenched real estate interests have a lot of power, and that aside I don't know what Yang himself thinks of the idea on the merits.
I don't think he's using fear of automation to sell UBI. I think he's using UBI to soothe fears about automation. That's behind a lot of the support for UBI among Silicon Valley folks - these are people who automate things for a living and want to keep doing that. But they don't want to feel like they're dooming the people whose jobs they're automating.
Also, if automation makes humans obsolete, then of course we can afford a UBI, in real terms. Where are all those robot-provided goods and services going to go, if not to those humans?
On Yang’s UBI plan: on the one hand, this plan is somehow targeted to only the people with the greatest need (how?), while the study and the other research you mention are for true unconditional benefits, i.e. no link to your current employment status. How does it avoid the “benefit trap” problem where getting a job would take you off the not-so-UBI?
Yang is wrong in his justification for UBI, but he should keep on campaigning on it.
It seems to me that many conservative Americans do not care about poverty reduction for they see poor people as "losers" and the rest as "winners". And that's like half the country.
They do, however, care about automation. Everyone recognizes that automation is not the fault of the unemployed.
Doesn't the fact that he didn't surround himself with any PhD's say something? Aren't we, "who we surround ourselves with?" I'm all for good guys, but if someone can't even build a good team for himself and he ran for president and now he's running for the mayor's office in one of the most powerful cities in the world, doesn't this say something? I like a lot of the things this article says, but BdB has been a disaster for NYC, and progressivism now has an ally in Biden and his administration. Are "we" sure that we want bet the house on Andrew Yang? I'm not convinced. At this point, I would not.
I probably only agree with half of Yang's proposals but the ones I agree with are really, really good ideas. At very least he is dramatically widening the Overton Window on the left.
You rejected MMT recently, presumably because of the inflation concern; yet MMT proposes the sovereign currency-issuing government faces an inflation limit, NOT a budgetary limit.
In other words, the limit to TOTAL spending, whether in the private or public sector, is the economy's productivity and availability of resources. [I will leave aside in this post how treasury, as opposed to the free market, can actually determine that limit].
Re robots: with increasing productivity, the sovereign currency-issuing government COULD reduce everyone's working hours while maintaining or increasing incomes, in conjunction with a Job Guarantee which ensures everyone can participate in the economy as best suited to the nation's needs, and be paid above poverty wages, whether in the public or private sectors.
Note,: Germany, Japan and China are all manufacturing nations, unlike the US, so productivity and employment will be more correlated in those nations than in the US (which is not to say the US shouldn't automate ASAP).
Krugman of course, a neo-liberal/neo-Keynesian economist (which has nothing to do with Keynes) will bang on about government debt and deficits: any advice he might have for Yang is useless.
Fact is: free markets are subject to market failure in many areas of the economy; and your assertion that Trump achieved close to full employment and rising living standards for low paid workers is a myth. That 3.7% unemployment figure (before the pandemic hit) is mainstream statistical fiction; un + underemployment + those who have given up looking, was closer to 10%, a disaster for those affected (and this was the best Trump achieved).
Re the UBI, yes it's too expensive under current treasury/central bank arrangements, though MMT could pay for welfare ("sit down money") to the extent is is required at all, which would be minimal if a Job Guarantee was in place:
In her book : 'The case for a Job Guanatee', " Pavlina Tcherneva proposes a job guarantee program in the US which would employ 11m people at a $15/hour standard wage in green care and conservation sector jobs. The US minimum wage is thereby automatically doubled to $15/hour. The program is deliberately countercyclical so that the job goes when the economy rebounds (p19,49). Her proposal creates economic growth valued at millions of dollars ..."
And here is James K. Galbraith on the baleful effects of central bankers who are indoctrinated in neoliberal free-market orthodoxy:
https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/project-syndicate/news/whos-afraid-mmt-2020457
"As anyone who has ever been responsible for legislative oversight of central bankers knows, they do not like to have their authority challenged. Most of all, they will defend their mystique—that magical aura that hovers over their words, shrouding a slushy mix of banality and baloney in a mist of power and jargon".
The baloney being that currency-issuing governments are limited by public debt and deficits.
‘Their main methodology is to go around asking engineers what kind of existing jobs they could make a machine to do; naturally the engineers say they could replace a lot of stuff. But even if the engineers are right, they’re actually talking about replacing tasks, not replacing jobs; the two are very different. As job tasks get replaced, the same humans might be able to spend their time doing more productive stuff — they’re still employed, and they get paid more (or get paid the same but have more leisure time). Meanwhile, mass automation will increase society’s income, which will increase labor demand and create whole new categories of jobs that these studies don’t even try to think about.
So the studies are useless’.
The lump of labour fallacy. Labour reductions in agriculture replaced by manufacturing, in manufacturing by services. But it may yet, though not yet, prove to be that AI +robotics is qualitatively different in replacing jobs not just tasks. You may have normalcy bias that failed you in predicting the implications of Covid. The inevitability of an income increase resulting in increased labour demand may proves false for this time. That income maybe invested in reducing labour demand as a component of the production of goods and services, not in as yet un-imagined ‘whole new categories of jobs’ beyond goods or services. I.e there’s no economic law preventing productivity rising faster than GDP, and reducing overall labour demand.
To your point on automation/robots eliminating tasks rather than jobs, it may not yet be creating unemployment, but it's already creating underemployment. The replacement of middle-class-salary-and-benefits manufacturing jobs with Amazon-warehouse-style gigwork as the primary option for Americans without college degree is still due, to a significant extent, to automation. If you employ 100 people to do the same set of things and someone invents a robot that can do 60% of the tasks in that set, you'll probably let 60 of them go.
A robust social safety net, whether through UBI or otherwise, would help these displaced workers either reeducate themselves, start their own businesses, or simply be in a better economic position to say no to crappy gigwork jobs that come along. And if enough employees in an area are able to, at least for a while, say no to the new crappy gigwork warehouse, the working conditions will have to improve to attract the work.
Of the three populists that ran in 2020, Trump blamed the economic woes of the Rust Belt on immigrants, Bernie on corporations and lack of social safety net, and Yang on robots (and lack of social safety net). Trump was wrong, Bernie was right but too general; I think Yang was actually right on the money
I see your point that Yang needs technocratic advisors but I don't think it makes sense to do that as a politician. Right now, his goal is to get elected, so why spend time on those kinds of details?
I'm not sold yet on Yang or any of the candidates. What I like most about him is that he's an outsider so there's some chance he could challenge our very powerful construction mafia, which has our current mayor and council and all our "machine democrats" securely in its pocket.
What I don't like is that Yang doesn't seem to really know the housing situation here very well. It's really too complicated to treat well in a blog comment. We have two big problems. First is the phoniness of the program that gives financial incentives to builders in return for setting aside some low-rent apartments (which in some areas are actually market rent, and in valuable areas are awarded to the least needy, sometimes even corruptly - e.g. entry-level machine politicians have been given priority to some buildings). Second is NYCHA, which the city is massively committed to but has been one disaster after another, especially its intentional isolation of mostly black people in places like Far Rockaway and Throgs Neck and Brownsville that are difficult to commute from and where resignation and hopelessness hang heavy in the air (and because the US government subsidizes NYCHA, they won't give Section 8 in New York as long as those least-in-demand projects have empty apartments). Yang's plans seem more rhetorical and idealistic than informed and realistic.
Yang is front-runner now merely by name recognition plus outsider status. To win he'll need to study up and get his fingers dirty.
To UBI or not to UBI isn't really a question for a mayor. I think one has to look at all of income redistribution holistically. In my opinion the problem with our present system is that as one moves up the income ladder from no-income to lower-middle-income ones sees very little additional take-home pay. We want to ensure everyone is fed and sheltered and educated, but we have done so in a way that removes much of the financial incentive to better one's plight, while on one hand discriminating against people in employment and policing and on the other chiding them for lacking a sense of civic duty. UBI is meant to restore some of that financial incentive, but whether it actually does or not depends on how UBI is funded.