I think the issue with ubi is it's not really basic. Cloths food and shelter are basic. I'm much more inclined to support ubi if it's food shelter cloths.
UBI as a productivity dividend
161–170 of 278 posts
Re: UBI as a productivity dividend
#162If you believe UBI can work, why do you think communism failed?
Seems to be ok in Alaska.
Re: UBI as a productivity dividend
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't matter at all how much it is. It'll be (almost entirely or entirely) eaten by landlords. I am a landlord. I am setting prices for renewal. I have come to learn that 100% of my possible customer base now has $200/mo more to spend. I raise prices $200/mo with absolute certainty that I will find a renter. Congrats, mission accomplished.
> I am a landlord. > I am setting prices for renewal. Landlords do not really set prices arbitrarily, especially not in HCOL areas where most of the cost is land rent. The rent is set by the market, and if there's a new UBI only a negligible fraction of it will go towards rent. Rents might even decrease since any given UBI amount will go a lot further in a lower-COL area, which incents people to move out (reversing g…
You’re making an argument for my point of view.
Rents are set by local wages (via mechanism of land rents)
> Rents might even decrease since any given UBI amount will go a lot further in a lower-COL area, which incents people to move out (reversing gentrification dynamics)
Can you identify any historical analogy to this claim?
History shows — across the board — people move toward higher COL areas as their ability to pay for COL grows.
Why would this be different?
Re: UBI as a productivity dividend
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Plus it is not literally putting money in people's hands which is often unpopular with some demographic groups I'd be really opposed to this. It'd only be ok if we nationalized the industries where we set these rules and rates. Otherwise, this ends up being a simple handout to private industries. For example, let's say we say x liters of water. Well who's deciding how much x liters cost? If it's a private company a…
Aren't utilities, by definition, state owned? Or is that also backwards in america?
It depends. Water is usually provided by the city here, but most electricity and natural gas is corporate-delivered.
Re: UBI as a productivity dividend
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, this argument does not apply to rent-seeking classes. I am describing land ownership specifically . Land is a totally n-of-one asset in that it is completely inelastic. It is not created nor destroyed by any human intervention whatsoever, and so its supply is not affected by prices whatsoever. The relevance of this is amplified by the fact that land is a required input for all forms of production. People and mach…
OK, so there are classes of activity that are fairly inelastic, but not as inelastic as those requiring use of land. Fair enough. But why would the cost of air travel not increase in response to UBI? It's not inelastic, but modest increases don't appear to reduce demand much at all. Or eggs (again, not inelastic, but not very elastic either)? The housing:land demand ratio is also not fixed, due to multi-level dwellin…
It would increase those prices! But that would then incentivize additional production, which would drive prices back down close to each good’s cost of production (modulo the suppliers’ dominance and ability to demand margin).
So same mechanism applies to land, except then there’s no way to spur additional production of land, so the price just goes up.
Re density etc: correct, which is why I’m not arguing this benefits homeowners or building owners, except to the degree they are also landowners. A building owner who does not own the land underneath his building would not benefit much, the person who he pays land rent to will capture nearly all of the upside.
Re: UBI as a productivity dividend
#166A think a more workable and politically palatable version of UBI would be some form of universal utility allowance. E.g. the first x kWh electric you use, or the first X litres of water, or the first x GB of data you use is entirely free, for everyone (where X is some reasonable number that someone could just conceivably survive on). Then as you use more and more the prices start to gradually increase across a series…
> Plus it is not literally putting money in people's hands which is often unpopular with some demographic groups I'd be really opposed to this. It'd only be ok if we nationalized the industries where we set these rules and rates. Otherwise, this ends up being a simple handout to private industries. For example, let's say we say x liters of water. Well who's deciding how much x liters cost? If it's a private company a…
> We've effectively had that here with the ACA, where the government has decided that it will cover the first $800 or so dollars of your health insurance. What happened? Magically, the cost of health insurance increased by $800.
I don’t think that’s an accurate description of ACA [1], it didn’t lead to a dollar to dollar increase in premiums (share a citation if otherwise), and it’s a bit misleading to say it led to an increase in premiums because plans pre-ACA were effectively inaccessible to and lacking in benefits for impoverished people or people with pre-existing conditions.
[1] Here’s a brief description of ACA from Wikipedia:
> The act largely retained the existing structure of Medicare, Medicaid, and the employer market, but individual markets were radically overhauled.[1][11] Insurers were made to accept all applicants without charging based on pre-existing conditions or demographic status (except age). To combat the resultant adverse selection, the act mandated that individuals buy insurance (or pay a monetary penalty) and that insurers cover a list of "essential health benefits". Young people were allowed to stay on their parents' insurance plans until they were 26 years old.
Re: UBI as a productivity dividend
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regulation is not what suppresses production, but the actual profit margins. It's extremely hard to make money building housing because the cost of land and labor are so high. These costs are high because we now live in an advanced economy where land can do much more valuable things than "be housing", and laborers can do much more productive things than "build housing."
Yup. Development companies contract when the housing market contracts. They aren't building houses for the fun of it, they are building them because they believe the 100 houses they build in a hot market will ultimately pay back the land purchase rights. They will never build so many houses as to decrease the cost of a home. I actually got my home from a developer right after the housing bubble. They confided in me t…
Yep — or aggressive subsidization of the inputs of housing production, or some other cost management of an input (such as a high LVT that discourages speculation and withholding of valuable land from use)
Re: UBI as a productivity dividend
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are plenty of places, even in the USA within the last 50 years, that have had a housing surplus. Yes, bad places at bad times. Can you name good ones?
Defining "good" and "bad" in this context requires lots of other answers first. When NYC had a housing surplus in the late 1970s, many people considered it to be a bad place. But even as they did so, a new generation of artists were moving into it. So was it a bad place at a bad time? Or a good place at a good time? When Seattle had a housing surplus in the late 1970s ("Will the last person to leave Seattle please tu…
You’ve described a set of bad places that then became undersupplied exactly in lock-step with them becoming desirable…?
Re: UBI as a productivity dividend
#169UBI doesn't make any sense when you imagine how it will play out. Let's consider what it actually implies on the face: labor has been obviated through automation and therefore humans no longer have a purpose on earth. UBI then amounts to a bribe paid to the remaining surviving masses of humanity so they don't go on to destroy all the automated economy and those who remain in control of the automated economy, if those are actually people in this future and not some statistical models running on their own. This is unsustainable. The masses of humanity will inevitably want a larger and larger bribe to sustain a standard of living in probably an inflationary environment. Eventually a tipping point will be reached where the models in charge of the planet determine it is more efficient to eliminate humanity than to continue paying increasing bribes.
Re: UBI as a productivity dividend
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Police unions aren't the same thing as other unions. Most unions exist to equalize labor negotiation through collective bargaining, and police unions tend to include and align with the leadership in the organization that a union would traditionally be negotiating with. In practice they're a lot more like a military contractor than a union (in that their role is to prevent public accountability)
This is correct and the proof is that police do not strike with labor they fight labor on behalf of capital The core premise of a union is that you have solidarity primarily across unions which is actually how you get collective-bargaining at larger scales
No, the core premise of a union is to represent the interests of its members. You've confused a union with global communism, and delegimitized the ones that don't serve your interests instead.
For an extremely salient example, the purpose of coal miners' unions is to serve coal miners. The interests of coal miners don't necessarily align with everyone else's interests, and if the the interests of their union did, it would be a bad union.
If police are racist, police unions are either racist or not representative. The purpose of unions isn't to serve the purposes of upper middle-class liberal arts majors. You don't steer workers through their union, that's evil. If you want coal miners to prioritize the climate, or police to prioritize civil rights, you have to do it the traditional way - by convincing them. You might have to convince them to quit.
The idea that the police don't deserve a union because police unions would support your enemy is repulsive. Change the laws, maybe you wouldn't have to hire scum to enforce them.