Instead of giving people free money, wouldn't it make more sense to heavily subsidise the basics? Is there any indication that UBI would work better than guaranteeing affordable food, housing and healthcare?
I hear this argument a lot but I don't think it necessarily follows:
- The supply of low end goods (the sort which you can afford with your UBI) is highly automated and will increase rapidly for any small price increase, making their pricing fairly inelastic.
- The demand for these goods won't rise greatly (except for low end luxury / status items, for which UBI makes the difference between people buying and not) since anyone living above a subsistence level is already buying roughly as much as they need (they're just feeling more financial stress now by doing so).
So overall I'd expect we might see a small price rise but nowhere near enough to cancel out the UBI.
It is true that with UBI people have the option to move somewhere where housing is inexpensive, but I don't think it's desirable to have people already dependent on UBI move to places with lower economic opportunity - cementing their dependence on it.
That being said, expensive housing is a problem that exists with or without UBI, even if it would interact with it in an unfortunate ways.
Exactly. One important piece of evidence is how housing became more expensive when families got double incomes.
It'll be interesting to see how a combination of UBI and increasingly available remote work affects the geographic distribution of property prices. We're not short on land area to build houses, after all - we're only short on land nice and close to economic centers.
It would be a bit different from the current inheritance based land value extraction since it would go to everyone instead of the lucky owners. I think it could be positive change though.
> wouldn't it make more sense to heavily subsidise the basics?
Breaking this down a little:
Industries with monopolist practices can be expected to raise their prices to capture more of this new income. I agree, that seems likely.
In my mind, this would likely include housing/land ownership.
By proposing to subsidise housing instead, you're proposing to effectively give this money directly to landlords instead of to everyone to have their own negotiating power and make their own decision.
But, won't the cost still just rise accordingly, by your theory - won't landlords just pocket that money and demand even more?
It seems more effective to trust people with their own money.
Nobody addresses themselves to the most reasonable interpretation of the thing they respond to, and that's the primary mechanism that pushes the quality of comment sections down. And I think we've got another datapoint in support of that here.
And what if it did? What if we gave every person the money and assets equivalent of the richest man on earth, 113 billion dollars [1]. Now Bezos would only be about twice as rich as the average person. Instead of being 1.13 million times as rich as the average household in the US [0]. Surely the prices would skyrocket, but now we're at a more even playing field.
[0]: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/whats-your-net-worth-and-h... [1]: https://www.forbes.com/billionaires
edit: Which kinda makes it a bad comparison to UBI I guess. Maybe what we need is more than just money for UBI, but also a distribution of assets.