Is it time to think about Universal Basic Income?

There's a fascinating op ed in today's NYT by Judith Shulevitz, misleadingly (I think) titled "It's Payback Time for Women."  She presents a number of arguments for the "U.B.I." proposals being considered in countries like Finland, Switzerland, and Holland.  She does begin with the "feminist" argument, and succinctly describing the politics of the feminist arguments for and against proposals for offering wages for care work.   She describes how "mainstream feminism" (at least in the U.S.) rejected this idea, buying into the prevalent assumption about motherhood:

It’s a lifestyle choice, not a wage-worthy job, and no one other than parents should pay for it. Wages for child rearing and housework? When one feminist collective took up that cry in the 1970s, it was more or less drummed out of the second-wave feminist movement, which aimed to get women into the work force, not pay them to stay out of it.

If mothers are glorified hobbyists who produce less value than nonmothers, it follows that they’re getting a free ride on everyone else’s labor. This can lead to tensions between colleagues, and also colors relations between breadwinning husbands and stay-at-home wives, who notoriously have less bargaining power in their households.

She argues, though, that 

this view of motherhood gets it exactly backward. Actually, it’s society that’s getting a free ride on women’s unrewarded contributions to the perpetuation of the human race. As Marx might have said had he deemed women’s work worth including in his labor theory of value (he didn’t), “reproductive labor” (as feminists call the creation and upkeep of families and homes) is the basis of the accumulation of human capital. I say it’s time for something like reparations.

(Citing very different authorities, and not using the language of 'reparations', I've made similar arguments (see here and here).

But Shulevitz then goes on to address many other arguments for a U.B.I., coming from many different directions:  that's it's increasingly becoming a necessary condition for a just society, in light of the growing gap between the rich and the poor in America, and the likelihood of more jobs being lost to computers in in the near future, including many skilled service jobs typically associated with women.  She offers data to counter arguments that U.B.I. represents a moral hazard, that it actually permits people to manage their careers more prudently, rather than disincentivizes them from working at all.  She discusses experiments and research suggesting that basic income policies have been effective in mitigating poverty, particularly specifically female kinds of poverty. 

Shulevitz suggests that U.B.I. proposals are springing up from the right as well as the left.  Honestly, I do not know much about these arguments, but I would love to hear what some of the other MOJ'ers think. 

For one thing, I do wonder if some of the "just wage" and "family wage" arguments might, if re-examined from a more feminist perspective, support these proposals as well.  As Schulevitz argues,

The U.B.I. would also edge us toward a more gender-equal world. The extra cash would make it easier for a dad to become the primary caregiver if he wanted to. A mom with a job could write checks for child care and keep her earnings, too. Stay-at-home parents would have money in the bank, more clout in the family, and the respect that comes from undertaking an enterprise with measurable value. And we’d have established the principle that the work of love is not priceless at all, but worth paying for.