This was a worry for me when leaving my full time job in 2022 to work on open source. Our OSS project was able to pay rent, but was concerned about healthcare costs for my partner and me (NY state has extended COBRA coverage, but it's extremely expensive). My co-founder lives in Australia, which has free basic health care, so he was up for leaving his job before I was.

Taking the risk was one of the best decisions I've made, but if I had a chronic health condition/higher healthcare costs, probably would not have been comfortable.

I grew up in Norway, that while it doesn't have UBI does have a safety net that meant the notion of ever living in poverty was just entirely foreign to me growing up, and for me at least I think that made it easier to take the decision to leave university and start a company.

The risk of ending unemployed was just never scary.

I think it’s more likely that UBI discourages business creation than encourages it.

Though the studies seem to show roughly zero net effect so perhaps these cancel out.

Several of the UBI pilot studies included new venture creation (including solo self-employment, not just classic business creation) as part of their measurements. The last few I looked at had zero difference in new business creation between recipients and control group.

A lot of the UBI trials have actually had disappointing results. The arguments usually claim that it’s not a valid test because it wasn’t guaranteed for life, or the goalposts move to claim that UBI shouldn’t be about anything other than improving safety nets.

Unfortunately I think the UBI that many people imagine is a lot higher than any UBI that would be mathematically feasible. Any UBI system that provided even poverty level wages would require significant tax increases to pay for it, far beyond what you could collect from the stereotypical “just tax billionaires” ideal. Try multiplying the population of the US by poverty level annual income and you’ll see that the sum total is a huge number. In practice, anyone starting a business would probably end up paying more in taxes under a UBI scheme than they’d collect from the UBI payments.

It takes a good idea and a willingness to take a risk to start a business. I don't think that risk aversion is what's stopping new businesses, there are a lot of people who do a lot of what I consider too risky.

Instead, what I wonder is how many new businesses wouldn't be viable under a tax structure that provides ubi and health care. Not to be dismissive but that's definitely a concern in a world replete with fledgling businesses that mostly fail.

UBI is both a pipe dream and unnecessary.

n = 1, but if we get UBI, I will immediately start a precious metals brokerage business.

It’s not, but we seem to have to keep convincing business people that they’re part of society, so it helps to be able to appeal to their pocketbooks, too.

The Canadian economy is not doing very well.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...

So tired of the argument.

Not everything is measured in "economic output", not to mention that metric itself doesn't make any sense when comparing countries of vastly different size, population etc.

Trust is irrelevant, families gain the after tax income of working mothers but society gains not just the pretax value but the actual value of work generated. Thus subsidizing childcare and moving the needle to align society’s benefits and family benefits is a net gain without the issue of trust being involved.

The same is true of quality public education etc, however creating US vs THEM narratives are politically powerful even if they don’t actually reflect reality.

While in a low trust society, which you obviously already have, people are most productive when they're at perpetual risk of starvation.