Can UBI actually work? An economist's take

The pilots — Finland, Kenya, Stockton — show the same thing: people don't stop working, mental health improves, and the money gets spent locally. The objections that survive scrutiny are about scale and funding, not laziness. At national scale the maths is brutal unless you change how it's funded. So UBI "works" as a policy; the open question is whether we can pay for it without inflation. That's a design problem, and design problems have solutions.