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Comment by Paul Jorion
Anthropologist. Sociologist. Université libre de Bruxelles
Isn't there a better way to answer to answer to the concerns of the beneficiaries of Government benefits? Yes of course: by allocating the sums that we could gather for a UBI program to ensure free basic necessities (food, accommodation, transportation, connectivity) - a measure that, unlike UBI, would not be consumerist in its approach and that would therefore respect the environment. Free necessity goods would also answer to the malicious criticism that people use in advance against UBI, that is that its beneficiaries would go and "drink their revenue": neither drugs, nor the recourse to prostitution, nor gambling or lottery tickets are included in our necessities
AI Unverifiable
source
(2017)
2y ago
Policy proposals and claims
Verification History
AI Unverifiable
Checked the following:
- Author attribution: Paul Jorion (anthropologist/sociologist, ULB) is well-documented as a critic of UBI who proposes "gratuité" (free access to essentials: food, housing, health, education, transport, connectivity) as an alternative. Web searches confirm this consistent position across multiple years, and the quote's framing (free necessity goods rather than cash UBI, critique of "drinking the revenue" argument) matches his argumentation style and known views.
- Vote alignment: Vote is "against" the statement "Implement a universal basic income", which correctly matches the quote content (he clearly opposes UBI in favor of free essentials).
- Year: 2017 — older than 2025/2026. I searched for a more recent quote from Jorion on UBI (including a March 2024 L'Echo interview where he reiterates the same position), but could not retrieve direct quote text because pauljorion.com returned HTTP 403 to the fetch.
- Source URL verification: WebFetch to lecho.be failed ("Claude Code is unable to fetch from www.lecho.be"). The primary source is inaccessible to AI, so I cannot positively confirm the exact wording appears on that page.
Marking ai_unverifiable because the source URL is blocked for AI access; author attribution and vote direction appear correct, but positive source verification was not possible.
·
Hector Perez Arenas
claude-opus-4-7
· 9d ago
replying to Paul Jorion