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UBI as a productivity dividend

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Re: UBI as a productivity dividend

#81

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

estearum wrote: post #77
EGG_CREAM wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a progressive government. The free market has failed to provide a necessary service. So now I pass a law that creates a not for profit contractor that builds houses. It’s not that complicated. We do it with fire departments, police, and many other services already. Free market might have been more efficient theoretically, but when it fails in practice we find another solution.

Yes, so un-complicated that we're now talking about state-built housing just to make UBI do anything other than enrich landlords. UBI is a bad idea. State-built housing is not necessarily a bad idea. You can just do the latter and skip the former.

Por que no los dos?

Re: UBI as a productivity dividend

#82

Post by K0balt »

zer00eyz wrote: post #58
K0balt wrote: post #37

UBI is the actual solution, and is well understood enough now to know that most of the arguments against it are moot points or simply falsehoods. Unfortunately, with regulatory capture at near 100 percent and electoral capture almost as bad, there is no incentive structure with sufficient influence to make it happen. Wealth will continue to be funneled to the top, and taxation schemes that act as a de-facto sales tax…

> Unions the actual solution No, they are not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co . Changing the table stakes is what needs to happen: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation for a counter example. Unions just create an us vs them mentality. The fact that the NUMMI plant ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI ) was not reproducible is a pretty strong indicator of that.

Sorry, my AI autocorrected “ubi is” to “unions”. When I came back to all these “unions bad” comments I was like WTF are they on about??? lol.

But, I will say, often, unions are very positive things. Other times, basically evil. So, I think unions are a mixed bag. But the threat of potential unionization is almost a universal good, so it’s a right worth exercising once in a while.

Re: UBI as a productivity dividend

#83

Post by estearum »

kbelder wrote: post #36
SoftTalker wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you control what other landlords do? Why won't any undercut you by $200 and get your tenants?

In a normal market, they would. But housing is highly regulated with artificial shortages, so that pricing is very distorted.

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."

Re: UBI as a productivity dividend

#84

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

estearum wrote: post #72
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything you've written here presupposes a housing shortage. Fixing the housing shortage is a central tenet of progressive policies (regardless of whether or not they may ever actually accomplish this).

Housing will always fall short of demand. Nobody, progressive or not, is actually willing to sustain an oversupply of housing.

This just isn't true across the time and space of human cultures and civilizations. There are plenty of places, even in the USA within the last 50 years, that have had a housing surplus.

The current problems have tended to arise when desirable work is geographically limited which then leads to a much larger housing shortage in those areas despite the presence of sufficient housing across a broader territory.

Re: UBI as a productivity dividend

#85

Post by estearum »

Anon1096 wrote: post #70
estimator7292 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because tenants are not scarce. If you cut your prices, you lose $200/mo forever. If you simply follow the maximum market price and wait, someone will fill your room eventually and you have them locked into a higher rate forever. Competition doesn't work for necessities. Someone will rent your room at any price because it's necessary for survival. One of the major crises of our time is the fact that there are more pe…

You're failing to explain what dictates the price the market will bear. > Why don't landlords undercut one another? They literally don't have to. The only outcome is less profit. You'll find a tenant eventually, at any price. is very obviously not true, otherwise prices right now would be effectively infinite. Why are prices for an apartment in SF only 3k/mo instead of 30k? Surely under your reasoning a landlord coul…

> Why are prices for an apartment in SF only 3k/mo instead of 30k? Surely under your reasoning a landlord could just wait and get a tenant at any price they set?

No, because local wages cannot sustain those prices

If local wages could sustain those prices, then yes all rents would rise to that new higher local income level

That is (quite self-evidently) prices are so phenomenally high in ultra high-income areas like SF

Every single landlord is setting prices by the same metric: what can the people who would live here be able to afford? Competition between landlords is almost nil, which is why you find almost no "deals" anywhere. The market is totally efficient. Everyone agrees on how to set prices: by local wages.

Re: UBI as a productivity dividend

#86

Post by estearum »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #84
estearum wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing will always fall short of demand. Nobody, progressive or not, is actually willing to sustain an oversupply of housing.

This just isn't true across the time and space of human cultures and civilizations. There are plenty of places, even in the USA within the last 50 years, that have had a housing surplus. The current problems have tended to arise when desirable work is geographically limited which then leads to a much larger housing shortage in those areas despite the presence of sufficient housing across a broader territory.

> 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?

Re: UBI as a productivity dividend

#87

Post by estearum »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #80
estearum wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but now you're not just talking about UBI, are you? You're now talking about UBI, plus rent controls, plus state-built housing. All to make UBI actually do anything at all other than enrich existing landlords. Why don't we just skip the UBI and the rent controls and instead just have the state build housing?

Because UBI is largely orthogonal to those things. It's a way of taking productivity gains and ensuring that the entire population benefits from them.

But... without those other changes... UBI doesn't benefit the entire population, as we've just established.

It benefits landlords.

Re: UBI as a productivity dividend

#88

Post by dangus »

Well, there's definitely other ways. I would prefer a system where company ownership public and private has a mandatory public stake in both ownership and voting on company policy and major business decisions.

I would prefer it illegal for the wealthy to possess an excessive amount of assets. If your assets became more valuable than the limit, the asset share would automatically rebalance toward other employees and owners in the organization who are below the asset ownership limit.

You don't even really need UBI if healthcare, housing, food, and education are considered basic human rights that are included and free of cost at point of usage.

Re: UBI as a productivity dividend

#89

Post by K0balt »

whattheheckheck wrote: post #53
K0balt wrote: post #37

UBI is the actual solution, and is well understood enough now to know that most of the arguments against it are moot points or simply falsehoods. Unfortunately, with regulatory capture at near 100 percent and electoral capture almost as bad, there is no incentive structure with sufficient influence to make it happen. Wealth will continue to be funneled to the top, and taxation schemes that act as a de-facto sales tax…

If its an easy 100m do a startup and get funding

I’m working on that, but there’s an incentive alignment problem for early stage investment capital that requires investors with a little longer view to avoid kneecapping the value proposition, as well as the potential positive aspects to society.

(Am I allowed to be a little ideological when we are facing the potential extinction of humanity?)

Re: UBI as a productivity dividend

#90

Post by SoftTalker »

larsiusprime wrote: post #50
SoftTalker wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does land value tax help in particular here? Landlord pays land value tax, which is distributed via UBI, and then paid back to the landlord in higher rents (in the above scenaro).

This is a good resource on the question -- Land Value Tax is not passed on to tenants, the landlord eats it. This is pretty unique among taxes, which is why LVT is a particularly good way to fund UBI, otherwise you would expect the UBI to result in inflated rents. https://progressandpovertyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/P...

The argument seems to be "that landlords are already charging the maximum that tenants are willing to pay for access to a given location and so cannot arbitrarily raise rents when a LVT is imposed."

But, if the tenants now have more money in the form of UBI, then that argument doesn't hold.

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