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Comment by guard-of-terra | Hacker News Reader

Why would people stay in expensive slums when they can e.g. move to countryside and live there for a fraction of those money on basic income?

I think predatory practices will decrease because people will be voting with their feet, no longer constrained by where they live.

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One of the most attractive aspects of basic income is exactly this. $10000 a year stretches a lot farther out in the boonies than it does in SF or NYC, and if you don't have to be there to work, that opens up a lot of degrees of freedom.

At the same time, it does create potential for severe clustering based on income, possibly resulting "basic income ghettos", with all the problems that entails.

I don't think this would be a problem. There's no reason for people moving out of cities to cluster anywhere in particular. Housing costs near jobs may remain out of reach for basic income alone, but they should still be much more reasonably aligned with wages, since if people start to get stretched, they can just quit and move away.

> There's no reason for people moving out of cities to cluster anywhere in particular.

Economy of scale. Given fixed size of the UBI check, you want to live where services are cheapest. And services will be cheapest in places where more people are serviced together, because that cuts down on distribution costs and other such overheads.

Also, areas where people who have more money than just UBI live, would have higher prices simply by virtue of there being more money in the local economy. This isn't really dissimilar from the existing arrangement, where rich areas are expensive to live in, and so there's natural geographic segregation. But UBI would boost this into high gear.

To clarify, I am a strong proponent of UBI personally. But I think we should be really careful with these kinds of unintended side effects, and try to anticipate and manage them before they cause a bigger mess than what we're trying to address.

Also, have a look at this: https://medium.com/migration-issues/should-a-universal-basic...

Economies of scale have failed. It's official.

Huge retailers today offer worse prices, lower quality and lousy service because they can get away with this, being the only game in town.

At the same time, rent in cities skyrocketed, making low-density and rural places much more affordable.

We now know that economy of scale peters off at some fixed scale.

That's about monopolies, not economies of scale. Yes, they often go together, but they don't necessarily have to.

People are social animals. Not everybody will move even if they were personally better off by moving.

Also not everybody can afford to move.

> can afford to move

Basic income is precisely about "afford" part.

Those who won't move will benefit too because landlords will have to work on retention.

> Basic income is precisely about "afford" part.

This assumes that basic income either includes an allowance for moving or contains enough of a surplus over basic needs that savings can be accumulated.

I actually think that communities might sponsor your moving on their turf as this will mean you'll spend your BI there for prolonged time.

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