There are still no jobs there, so either those landlords keep the rent low enough that people can afford some kind of existence on UBI, or their houses stand empty (like they do at the moment). And competition would limit rent - on a national scale there is already a lot more housing than needed and the result is that rent is very low in flyover country, but people still can't afford to live there, whereas landlords in the cities that have jobs are currently a de facto oligopoly that can squeeze and squeeze.

> Laws of economy are like laws of physics: you cannot cheat them. All the UBI will do is it will raise the nominal prices of everything, but no poor person will be better off because of it.

At first order UBI is wealth transfer not wealth creation - the working poor will be better off, the middle/upper class will be worse off. At second order UBI unlocks a lot of real value that's currently a deadweight loss: people who could work for a few hours a week, but don't because that would lose them their benefits. It frees up the labour that's currently burned on complex benefit administration to be redirected to doing something productive instead. And by making it easier for people to change jobs, get training/education, or start a business, it increases labour efficiency.

There is no free lunch in economics, and if anyone tells you their policy will make people better off then you're right to ask where the brass tacks of that value creation actually lie. But UBI has some compelling answers.

And you seem to miss the fact that with UBI you have no incentive to live and stay in an expensive area.

For the deposit amount on an average house where I live I would cover 80% of the cash price of a bigger house country side. But you know, I'd have no work.

The problem is not housing, the problem is cramming all the work in cities. My last 3 jobs could've been done remotely, I asked and was always denied even while offering to take a pay cut.

I and many like me despise living in cities, we do not live there by choice. I've slightly moved out of a big one (London) but still live/work in the outer rim where housing is a dream far away, even on a way above average salary.

Give me UBI and I quit my job to settle country side tomorrow, so would my wife. So would a few of my colleagues.

Yeah, this is why I am against a UBI that is based on living costs. If you are going to divide society along those who work and those who don't you can't mix and match them in the same region. They'll have to live in cheaper places with less opportunity to make it easier for those who do decide to work. The idea that people live in SF on UBI without working while they push workers out is absurd. It would be a dysfunctional system that collapses on itself.

Sure, if you want to live on a UBI exclusively go to Florida and find a nice and quiet community in a cheap location.

I don’t have a strong opinion on UBI, but I want to challenge you on this.

If everyone gets $20k per year, let’s say the median earner goes from $40k to $60k. An increase of 50%. And let’s assume that we don’t increase taxes, even though it would definitely play a role.

Pretty soon, inflation kicks in and everything goes up 50% in price.

But a low income earner of $16k per year is now making $36k per year. More than double! So the 50% increase of prices means that the UBI helps the lower income person’s purchasing power to be on a more level field with the middle earners, even though the middle earners obviously still are better off with their larger income. Just less so.

And the person making $200k is now making $220k. But the 50% inflation means that they have to lower their consumption a bit, to be more in-line with the median earner.

So introducing UBI like this causes an automatic rebalancing between different levels of income, somewhat, even if the median earner is unaffected. Obviously this is greatly simplified though.

This is one of the reasons why a local UBI doesn't really work.

If you have a national UBI, people can move. That landlord may try to capture the surplus in California, but with a UBI you can simply move somewhere cheaper.

People in the middle class forget that simply moving is expensive and requires a remarkable amount of cash up front.

I think the remaining work will be such more meaningful that it will be net dealienation. I think less stress and more free time begets curiosity, so I think it's fair to say people could get a lot out of work than they do from their current drudgery.

In the long term, think large amounts of leisure time but ones does "tours of duty" in each of the core industries that power modern society as part of liberal education of how society functions.

> I also worry that the fundamental problem is not so much income but cost of living. The way things work today, any amount of UBI that you pay but just drive up the rent. If we don’t significantly increase housing supplies to meet demand, I don’t see how we can break that loop.

See https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/universal-basic-income-... for the results of some modeling. Rent in absolute terms and as a portion of income went down!

UBI is particularly susceptible because it is a one-time universal increase in income. The increaes is very predictable by landlords and housing sellers.

> If this is the wrong direction, should we make opposite changes - concentrate wealth in fewer hands?

Means-tested welfare, minincome, negative tax, minimum wage increases - all these are better than UBI. UBI needs to die as a meme.

> in general it is not the case that prices would rise to consume all citizens' disposable income

I believe that this is the case under UBI. Based just on housing alone! Even minimum wage increases are subverted by price rises. UBI would be costly and have minimal positive impact with the possibility of massive negative impact. It is the worst of all worlds.

People need to understand that there are two UBIs - - Right wing UBI where welfare is liquidated and the proceeds distributed (to the tune of $8k/yr) -> increased income inequality, medieval levels of poverty - Democratic UBI where $24k is given to all and sundry funded by taxes on high income individuals and corporations + printing money -> hyperinflation, economic collapse

Neither of these are futures that we want. Please consider alternatives.

That's probably NOT what is going to happen if you implement UBI. Rather people complaining UBI is too low for the place they are currently living in. Well known phenomenon.

Then it would have to be funded with local taxes. Why should people with a median salary pay taxes so that someone can get a UBI that is higher than the median salary?

>Assuming that not everyone can be successful in life (in spite of having boatloads of IQ + work ethic) UBI might be one of the few ways left to reduce generational in-equality.

Or you could just get rid of money hoarding and land hoarding. Just think about it. The time people spend unemployed or underemployed is gone but the money isn't. Thus the value of the claim to labor (money) is greater than what the economy can support. The inevitable result is inequality just from a pure logical perspective. The conventional solution had been to just let the economy grow endlessly so that the economy becomes strong enough to support all the freeloaders. Alternatively you let inflation act as a soft default on that unsustainable claim to labor.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/08/27/754323652/the-...

Sure, but its just a shifting of costs. Either the employer pays them the extra $ or the government taxes everyone and makes up the difference. It comes out of the economy in either case.

I think UBI is a great idea, but so is minimum wage, and so is welfare, etc, etc. They're are all great ideas intended to help people in tough conditions.

I think it just sets a floor on the wages of such undesirable jobs. And if the new wage to attract labor is higher than the marginal product of the worker, it’s likely that the job goes away rather than experiencing wage-driven inflation. In the worst case, this would simply lead to reduced output. In a best case the higher wage demanded would make capital investment more attractive, as it would improve the productivity of employees.

With all due respect, but this opinion reeks of someone who actually has the ability to choose his own job, say no to exploitative employment-practices, all while actually getting payed decently.

Someone who has to work a shit job they hate for a salary that barely pays the bills because they simply have no other option might as well be miserable because of this situation. This endless slog they cannot escape, a treadmill they despise but have no other choice than to keep going.

And let's not kid ourselves - there are _a lot_ of people out there who are doing jobs they don't want to do, or at least wouldn't want to do for the kind of salary they receive.

I think you're wrong about that because UBI frees people to go and live anywhere. They won't be trapped in lousy housing one bus-ride from their McJob anymore. The only way housing would suck up the entire UBI is if everyone were trapped in a California situation where new housing was impossible.

Even if the vast majority did make that decision (which I don't think is plausible under any UBI that would be sustainable in even the very short term in the near future) it would eliminate wage signals it would be a result of shifted wage signals, and the response of the market to those signals.

In theory, no. A UBI is not a free pass for a luxurious lifestyle, it's a basic income. If you want more than that, you'll have to work. If you want to not work at all and sit on your ass, then sure, you can go move to Tornado Alley or frigid Minot or wherever and live cheap and make some extra cash doing odd jobs like shoveling snow maybe, and smoke pot most of the time. I don't think most people want to live that way; people are too greedy for that, and want a nicer standard of living than the bare minimum. So, people will strike a balance, like they already do: they'll look for places that are affordable, but where jobs are also located. But unlike now, they won't feel so much pressure to live where jobs are, and might take a chance moving somewhere cheaper. We'll probably see more movement to lower-cost, smaller cities, and maybe some revitalization of small towns, but overall I don't think it'll be all that huge. I would expect a lot of people to move out of the really high-rent places where they're being subsidized by government programs to stay there.

>also what happens to all the people living in projects in what would otherwise be expensive areas? Ship them off to a sparsely populated non desirable area? Good luck with that

Why not? If they can't pay the rent, they'll be evicted. Then they'll have nothing but the clothes on their backs, and their UBI check, so if they want to have a roof over their head, they'll get a bus ticket to someplace cheap. This is a good thing: they're not contributing productively to their current city of residence, and instead of draining it of taxpayer funds, and they're taking up space that could be used for more economically productive residents. If their labor is really needed there, then the business owners need to raise their wages to allow them to afford the rent there, otherwise the businesses can go under. If the place is so high-rent that all the businesses move out and all the service workers move out, no problem, it'll collapse under its own weight and then after the landlords all go bankrupt the rents will go back to sustainable levels. Trying to keep people like that in an area isn't doing anyone any favors, except those who are profiting from the situation.

Maybe, maybe not.

For clarity, I am a fan of UBI. But I'd like to run through a hypothesis about an adverse effect.

If you add the UBI and costs go up accordingly, the real, marginal benefit they can obtain by working for $3.25 an hour will actually decrease.

This means someone who is in circumstances where they can currently earn a meagre income to tip the balance to being able to make ends meet in that circumstance, will find their ability to work the same amount in a UBI world will not tip the balance to being able to make ends meet.

In other words they will be pushed to change circumstance, towards more work and/or lower cost. E.g. move somewhere cheaper, work more hours.

This does not sound like a net benefit for the already impoverished. It sounds like a trap, because low-wage working will provide less marginal benefit to change what people can afford when they are stuck.

I often argue that the markets do not optimize for the right outcomes, thus not so great, but even I do not think they are that stupid nor inefficient.

If your standard of living has not improved (by your previous argument), why would the markets raise the price for the Toyota Camry? So they get less sales? Why would the workers agree to do the same work for less even if they are gettin extra money?

An UBI will definitely shift the markets and maybe not in a good way, but that analysis seems so absurd that I consider even calling it an oversimplification to be too generous.

They will all find work, which they will be able to without a minimum wage.

Suppose it costs $18,000/year to live here and we have a $12,000/year UBI. Finding a job that pays $18,000/year is not possible for everyone but finding a job that pays $6,000/year is, so they don't die.

> Also, you assume the economic value of a basic job is zero. Is providing child care for working women really worth $0? How about building infrastructure?

It isn't that the value is zero, it's that the value is less than what you're paying them. Because otherwise it would just be a regular job.

And it is not likely that the government is going to find highly productive work for everyone rather than ending up with a lot of people digging holes and filling them back in. The whole "central planning doesn't work" thing.

> In fact, this could be a net gain for the treasury if we replace overpaid government union workers with basic jobbers.

If we could actually do that, i.e. find workers to do the same work for less money, then we could/should do it regardless.

> If you want to argue that the BJ is somehow more expensive than a BI, could you provide a back of the envelope calculation showing how that would work?

A UBI is purely redistributive. You aren't actually buying something, you're only moving money around. It only makes sense to talk about "cost" in the sense of net transfers with government for a given person. For the average person it costs nothing -- they pay $X in taxes and receive $X in UBI, net is zero. People at below average income are net receivers, so if you want to talk about what it "costs" it has to be what it costs to people with above average income.

Moreover, a UBI replaces both welfare/basic job and the progressive tax structure, because the effective tax rate as (taxes - UBI)/income is inherently progressive even with a uniform marginal tax rate. With a basic job you still need a progressive tax structure, which from the perspective of our above average income taxpayer means they then have to pay a higher marginal tax rate than lower income people.

And under both the current welfare system and a UBI, the effective rate paid by lower income people is negative. So unless you're willing to put in place a system that is less progressive than the existing one, a basic job would also have to be coupled with transfer payments to lower income working people. To be equally progressive the transfer payments would have to be the same as the UBI net of taxes.

So they end up costing "the same" until you get to the question of what happens to people who can't find a job that pays a living wage.

Then under a UBI, you let people find whatever job they can even if it doesn't pay a living wage, and let the UBI supplement it so they don't starve.

With a basic job, the government invents work for people.

In some kind of hypothetical sense these could cost the same amount as well. You have a job whose actual economic value is $6000, under a UBI you take the job for $6000 and get a $12,000 UBI, under a basic job the government pays you $18,000 to do the job and then has $6000 worth of productive work done which it can sell on the market or whatever.

But the underlying assumption is that the government is as good at finding productive work for you to do as you are. The bureaucracy itself will waste money, it won't optimize for job satisfaction or consider economically productive activity like providing child care for your own children, and it will have the incentive to invent less productive unskilled jobs for everyone rather than matching each person's abilities to the job. Fundamentally it assumes that the government is as efficient at the market at allocating work, which is hopelessly wrong.

On top of that, it makes the relative value of the basic job too high, so that people have no reason to choose a real job that pays $17K/year and produces >=$17K/year in real value over a basic job that pays $18K/year but only produces $4K/year in real value.

So how does a basic job cost more? Because with a UBI there is someone receiving $12K/year from the government while getting paid another $12K/year to do a job that creates $14K/year in economic value, and then pays $4K/year in taxes, so the government is net -$8K/year to this person. Whereas with a basic job the government is paying the same person $18K/year to produce $4K/year in economic value (which they prefer over the $12K/year real job), so the government is net -$14K/year to the same person, the person has $2K/year less in their pocket and there is $10K/year less economic value produced.

That would only be true if you adopted a monumentally stupid funding model, so I'd recommend if you adopt UBI, you don't do that. The most sensible funding models involve new high-end taxes to fund basic income (wealth or property taxes with a broad exemption that would leave out most of the lower, working, and middle classes seem a popular idea recently, though I personally prefer, to give the short form, to at least start with equalizing taxes across forms of income to remove the preference for capital and other non-labor income).

> UBI removes the incentive to work for a lot of people who are comfortable being at the base level of subsistence it allows.

People are more than happy to put additional effort into increasing labor income when already working considerably and earning more than a subsistence level, so I find that argument specious ab initio, moreover, UBI, to the extent it replaces existing support programs that create disincentives to additional income, would actually increase the incentive to earn outside income, and reduce barriers to doing so.

> Now UBI is a form of central planning.

Even if you can stretch the definition of the latter so that's a sensible statement, its certainly less central planning than traditional means- and behaviorally-tested social welfare systems by any sane standard, so if it in anyway (even by simply counting as income against those systems qualifications) displaces such systems, it reduces the role of central planning in the economy.