Would a UBI End Everything We Love About America? No.

In a recent New York Times op-ed, Harvard professor N. Gregory Mankiw asks, “Can America Afford to Become a Major Social Welfare State?” By welfare state, he has in mind the Biden administration’s modest plans for better child benefits, healthcare, and education. Nothing as as radical as a universal basic income. But the points he makes raise the question: If even incremental improvements to social policy are inconsistent with Americans’ ideas about the “kind of nation we want to be,” what would he say about a full-scale UBI?

Mankiw is worried that stronger social protection policies would undermine both prosperity and democracy. Let’s take these one at a time.

Prosperity

Prosperity, for Mankiw, means GDP. Yes, America has lots of that. He points out that as of 2019, GDP per capita was 14 percent lower in Germany than in the United States, 24 percent lower in France, and 26 percent lower in the United Kingdom. None of those countries has a UBI, but they do have the kind of higher taxes that critics say a broad basic income would require. (See here for an outline of a narrower, “baseline” basic income that would not require new taxes.)

But GDP per capita has its limits as a measure of prosperity. It is, after all, an average whose numerator lumps together the incomes of…