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The effects are profoundly complicated by implementation details; but in theory...

'Trading' is a complex little signalling display where the seller shows how hard it is to produce a good (represented in price) and the buyer signals that they have previously contributed enough of some sort of resource to justify the production of the good (represented by having the money to pay the price).

UBI messes with that by allowing everyone to signal they contributed economically even if they did not. This effectively redistributes resources contributed by someone who is economically productive to someone who is not.

The impacts of that are hard to nail down. It might cause some prices to rise and other prices to fall. It will likely cause less resources to be allocated to the future; because economically unproductive folks tend not to invest in the future. However it is much more efficient than the bureaucratic complexity of a modern welfare state and easier to reason about.



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