Y Combinator Learns Basic Income Is Not So Basic After All
wired.com
wired.com
If you don't solve the affordable housing problem, basic income doesn't have any hope of ending poverty. If you do, many people who are currently living with terrible distress could make their lives work.
If you are only going to work on one of the two, affordable housing should be the priority. If you want do both, cool. But I'm not really seeing affordable housing given anywhere near the attention that basic income is getting.
the problem of affordable housing is actually very simple and the solution is obvious; too many people are moving to big cities; so everyone ends up competing for increasingly limited real estate (in a desperate bid to cut their commute times to less than 2 hours per day).
One of the main reasons why so many people are moving to urban centers is because that's where all the jobs are; it's a direct result of the centralization of capital in the hands of corporations. Corporate HQs are in big cities because they want to get access to the best talent and corporations are more likely to find talent in places where there are lots of people to choose from.
One solution would be for the government to introduce legislation to encourage companies to hire remote workers. Another solution would be for the government to introduce legislation to make the economy less focused on corporate growth.
Due in a large part to corporate lobbying, whenever a politician is presented a choice between a free solution and an expensive one; they tend to pick the expensive one.
You want the population clustering into big, transit-centric cities to unwind car-dependence and avert climate change.
The current urban migration is basically a reversal to the mean and should be beneficial in the long term.
Racism absolutely played a role in how it went down, as did government policy. But the invention of the modern suburb grew directly out of the events of WW2 making it possible for the US to rapidly build large numbers of homes.
People moved away from urban centers because they believed (correctly) that living in dense cities detrimentally impacted their health. This later accelerated in part because of racial reasons.
Housing demand could have easily been met (and was met in Asia and Europe) by building denser urban structures, which is what you would expect to happen if there was a confluence of housing demand, increased wealth, and a general interest in living in cities. There was no interest in the latter, which is why suburbanization took place.
Capital naturally wants to aggregate and trickle up, not trickle down. So if most of the newly minted Fed money was injected at the bottom (instead of at the top as is the case now), it would probably flow through the whole system more efficiently.
We need a progressive tax on corporate revenue (ex > 100M 0.1%, >250M 0.3%, >500M 0.5%) so companies have to pay more if they use economies of scale to consolidate power. It should be more expensive to be big.
It is, but they can afford it because when it comes to access to capital, they're at the front of the line. When the Fed creates new money through government loans or engages in open market operations, corporations are the first entities to get a hold of that money. It's like they have pipelines that feed new Fed-generated cash straight into their bank accounts.
Just look at Oracle; their software is mostly legacy. They make all their money from huge government contracts. The government doesn't really care about how inefficient or expensive Oracle is because the money comes from taxpayers; if the government overspends, they can just get more money from the Fed.
Perhaps the government needs to create that money through UBI instead.
SROs used to be pretty commonly available. We tore down up to 80 percent of them over the course of two decades, probably because Baby Boomers were wealthy enough to not need something that cheap. We never rebuilt them.
I think rebuilding them would be a step in the right direction.
They used to be just normal rentals for people just starting out who didn't have much money. If you watch old movies or movies set in a prior era (like "A walk in the clouds"), this was normal market-rate housing for folks without tons of money. And that's mostly not the case anymore in the US.
Also, the last time I looked -- back when I actually lived in the San Francisco Bay Area well over a decade ago -- SROs in San Francisco were already more than $1000/month.
I would like to read through the several thousand page Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, but I'm having trouble finding the time. I haven't gotten very far.
I am trying to create pilot programs and find things that actually work. I would like to stop just shooting down suggestions that don't work and start saying "Well, we did x, y and z in my small town and that got such and such results and here is how you can try to replicate that." But I'm still struggling to make ends meet myself, and yadda. So it's slow going.
In my mind if you have the interest to read HackerNews you would have the skills to get a decent job that would get you off the street. I'm clearly unaware of the obstacles that prevent that and would like to learn more.
I live in South Africa and the inequality here is horrendous but most of that is due to a disparity of education. There is a shortage of skilled workers so in my mind someone with HN interests wouldn't struggle to find enough work to avoid homelessness.
Part of it is that housing policy here has serious issues. We have changed zoning, etc, such that it is nearly impossible to build the kind of walkable communities that existed in this country before the automobile took over. The New Urbanist movement tried to build walkable communities. They found it very challenging to get such plans approved at all.
Another piece is that we don't have good health care policies. Most people on the street in the US have some kind of health issue, whether medical or mental health. Our policies in the US don't do a good job of providing for such people. Most developed countries have much better policies for dealing with people with serious issues of that sort.
Here are a couple of my blogs if you want to try to read through them, though I don't know if that will really answer your question:
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/
https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/
I would like to see the affordable housing shortage tackled and the health care issue resolved. I think if those issues are not resolved, basic income will likely actually make things worse for poor people who will then get dismissed as not trying hard enough, not managing their UBI, etc. I think giving UBI to people in the current American climate will just mask the real problems and make people who are comfortably well off even more callous about "Not my problem. It's just a personal issue and the world isn't obligated to fix your personal issue."
I already get told on a regular basis that the housing crisis isn't really a problem. It isn't a problem for the well-heeled, so they don't see why others find it so monstrous and impossible.
Note that the University system is a form of this - and it worked! springing up "college towns" all over the country, many then creating job centers for decades.
The problem is that big cities (esp Silicon Valley) have figured out how to "poach" newly formed companies: you can have my capital, but I need you to relocate...
It should quickly progress so that you have to sell your eleventh house to pay annual tax for tenth and to count your properties you should include the ones you own directly but also the ones owned by entities you own.
This tax would be even good if the money gathered was used for any purpose other than basic income. It incentivises ownership by dropping property prices and discourages rent seeking hoarding of finite and basic resource.
Go to a smaller town and housing is pretty cheap there. If you get a larger influx of people moving there because of cheap housing, then those cities will suddenly have more job openings available because they have to meet the needs of more people.
Let me correct that for you: a single, childless person cannot maintain a lower-middle class living standard on $1000/month. If you start giving up amenities, you can live on less money. You don't need cable TV, nor do you need to have a budget for eating out. Of course, the two single biggest savings you can do are a) move to a lower cost of living area and b) get a roommate or two. Half the rent of a 2-bedroom apartment is going to be about 50-60% the rent of a one-bedroom apartment.
Basic income shouldn't be targeted to ensuring that people can afford to bum around on no income in a high-cost of living area. If you want to live in a high-cost location, you should secure the income to live there.
Sam Altman and other tech giants are proposing basic income as a means to provide for people incapable of getting jobs due to automation permanently eliminating jobs for large numbers of people. They predict permanent unemployment of up to 80 percent of the population.
The jobs being eliminated currently pay between $20k and $50k. Once they eliminate those jobs, they are talking about giving you about $10k and no hope of ever having a full time job again.
Please go talk to the people who are proposing UBI as a solution to this scenario, not me. I am not actually pro UBI. I am for seeing this as another industrial revolution and further improving worker's rights. Among other things, the first industrial revolution gave birth to the expectation of a 40 hour work week in order to spread earned income around.
I am all for people working for a better life. But people like Sam Altman would like to design a world in which that is simply not possible for most Americans and would like to then throw a few crumbs to the masses for whom a job is simply not a possibility in the world they foresee and would like to optimize for.
(Though I think if your goal is to eliminate jobs -- rather than find ways to redistribute work -- then UBI needs to be designed as a middle class income, not a poverty level income. Otherwise, you are an asshole in my book if this is the world you want to design for people who aren't already millionaires.)
The part of the problem that nobody ever seems able to solve, is what you do for existing owners who are locked into a 30 year mortgage on their $1,000,000+ property. You would effectively be wiping out their life savings. There would need to be some way of appeasing the existing owner base, before you can ever solve the housing crisis.
In the 1950s, most new homes were around 1200 square feet and held about 4.5 people. Today, the typical new home is over 2400 square feet and holds about 3.5 people (IIRC).
I see zero reason why 2400 square foot homes would lose any value whatsoever if we built more small homes so people who can't afford a house that big can still afford a place of their own.
One factor why house prices are high is that demand exceeds supply. By building small homes, a lot of demand would be catered to by a new pool of housing. Heck, even those who could afford bigger houses but prefer smaller houses for whatever reasons (eg. frugality) would be removed from demand side. So now there would be a downward pressure on house prices.
This means that downward pressure on home prices amounts to slowing hyperinflation to a more reasonable rate. This isn't remotely the same as gutting the equity for existing homeowners (much less putting them "upside down," where they owe more than the house is worth).
http://www.worldpropertyjournal.com/real-estate-news/united-...
Finding something under $550 almost anywhere I'm the US that isn't senior housing or a trailer is challenging. They exist, but it's not as readily available as many people seem to imagine. There are places for less than that, but if you expect some kind of decent housing on a budget, it's a tough thing to find.
I live without a car and that complicated things. A lot of places don't have walkable neighborhoods or good transit. If you need a car to get around, that substantially increases your real cost of living.
I get really tired of repeating myself on this topic. I also worry that I will get viewed as someone harping on it or with a political agenda for simply trying to rebut the endless statements about how poor people can just move someplace cheap.
I'm poor. I have portable income. I'm a former military wife who doesn't mind moving. And I found it incredibly challenging to find someplace to move that I could afford and where I could readily access basic essentials like groceries and good internet service without a car.
If "just move someplace cheap" was all it took, I would have shut up about my problems years ago and just sat around humming to myself about how slick I am and how all the other poor Americans are just dummies who are doing it wrong. It's really not that simple. Even if you have portable income, finding an affordable, livable place in the US is challenging.
It complicates things quite significantly. In fact, if you were to remove this constraint then the problem becomes much more tractable. This factor alone limits you to urban locations because public transit alone is hard enough to find and absolutely nowhere in the US had decent public transit outside of an urban core except for a few cities that are already expensive to start with. There are not many of these places where you are not going to be competing with either university students, well-paid 20/30-somethings, or both.
To be honest I don't think any American city is going to provide this and until Americans get over their automobile fetish I don't think any place will even try to serve this requirement. It is quite normal in Europe, but only big, expensive cities work well for people without cars.
I'm wondering if you've thought of how much having that portable income would have helped you if you were actually able to drive.
If 90% of people with portable income were able to drive would they be able to move to cheaper places successfully? If that were to happen then the 10% who couldn't drive would suddenly find less competition (and therefore lower costs) for renting places in the areas that actually had good public transit options.
My medical bills are supposed to be thousands per month. I live on under $2000 per month most of the time. I am vastly more productive in dry areas with little ragweed and I need much less in the way of medical care.
This is part of why a lot of these one-sized-fits-all solutions for poor Americans are fundamentally bad ideas: They optimize for one metric only -- upfront cost -- and completely ignore large numbers of other issues.
The reality is that "cheap" solutions are often very expensive. Poverty is an expensive way to live.
If you look at the lifetime cost of a solution, the "cheap" answer is often the absolute most expensive in the long run.
Saying poor Americans with portable income should just leave the country doesn't strike me as a real solution, for a long list of reasons.
As the American population ages, this is increasingly becoming an issue. If you need to drive to maintain your independence, you lose your independence when you can no longer safely drive, possibly because you simply don't see well enough anymore, even if you are otherwise competent.
My sucktastic eyesight is part of why I no longer drive.
One of the issues in the US is that small towns and rural areas often lack high speed internet. If we could spread high speed internet to small towns and rural areas, that would help. It would make it easier to shop online for things not supplied by local stores, keep yourself entertained, do some socializing via internet and even have an earned income as a remote worker if that's what you want.
This was one of the things I checked for before moving to a small town to get back into housing. Since I do earn money via remote work, I need reasonably high speed internet to make my life work. I can't function on dial-up speeds.
Many people casually suggesting poor people should move to cheaper parts of the US don't seem to realize that those places may not have high speed internet. Good internet access can go a long ways towards making life without a car work. If you have neither a car nor good internet, moving someplace cheap in the US can be a serious hardship that cuts you off from having much of a life at all.
But it should be easy to get a visa to live in Mexico, Costa Rica, Portugal, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovenia, etc.
Thailand and India are more complicated, yes, but getting out for a couple of days every and year and coming back is not such a big issue.
Moving to countries which are objectively unsafe outside of a few protected tourist hotspot areas isn’t a good idea for anyone who’s vulnerable.
And I think the reality of this statement is lost of many folks, because it's not just large cities that have this problem. I live in a moderately sized city (~100k people) and rents here are nearly $1000/mo for an average one bedroom apartment.
Everybody starts getting basic income? Rents will rise to eat up the majority of that income without some external control. The same way we needed unions, minimum wage, etc. we need a collective bargaining system for the renters vs. landowners. Rent control, what have you. It's kind of the antithesis of the American dream but what we have isnt working all that well.
There is a serious homeless problem in the US. Some folks "living somewhere" are living in a tent or an illegal Air BnB etc.
They live together when they prefer to have their own base (like 4 workers sharing the same 2 bed-rooms). They also live with their parents, as inconvenient as it is.
No there is a housing problem.
The west could leverage by doing that plus having an option to have a country side home and car for the weekend. Instead we have busy highways, old buildings, slow common transportation, etc...
New York is a good example but it blows my mind why they don't invest more in the subway, modernize the buildings, etc... Plus it cost a fortune to live there.
Free markets need 'choice' to work efficiently, consumer choice, manufacturers choice, its always labour who don't have 'real choice' as you need to work to survive, it's not a choice. And no labour market is ever liquid or fluid enough to afford 'choice' and the very nature of labour makes quick choice difficult.
What basic income has the potential to do is introduce choice in this critical component of free markets and give it the same power as capital and consumer choice.
However given how disruptive it is to 'entrenched interests' its an extremely difficult idea to pull off. It defines the bitter struggle between capital and labour for 300 years and there won't be easy wins. Studies, funding, motives, methodologies, data need to be examined carefully as they could be studies simply to discredit the idea and kill it at birth, or reduce it to a 'extremely basic income' as a tool to subsidize employers.
I think there's a general problem here, about the "how much you got?" economy -- increasingly many critical goods are charged for in a way that effectively eats up any gain in income. For example, college and health care -- you get hit with an obscenely high bill and they just figure out how much you can really afford and charge that.
If you took all the investors out of the housing market, housing should cost just the price of construction.
$500k properties are torn down to build new homes.
Is this really the demographic that should be optimized for? Seems there's a nice financial incentive to find a partner and split the cost of rent. As a single childless person myself (who has shared rental houses with a friend for several years now to lower costs of rent and keep it "affordable") I've been led to believe that the cost of having children amortizes (especially as you add more children) with incentives, and really pays off as you get into old age. If it were up to me I'd rather optimize for the family unit rather than singles.
We have more singles, more childless couples and more single parents. Their housing needs are not being met. We expect young single people to rent an apartment designed for a family and get roommates.
If that works for you, that's already available. The assumption that someone with basic income should get a roommate is an assumption that they really aren't allowed to aspire to the same things as middle class people, like a space of their own.
A lot of women currently de facto use a romantic partner as a means to cover rent and it causes all kinds of problems. Expecting people to pair off to have a decent place is essentially expecting a polite form of prostitution.
What it really boils down to is that an average middle class family in the past had a full-time housekeeper. Typically, those housekeepers were single women. Nowadays, that same demographic group has kids of their own. I wouldn’t call it prostitution so much as pragmatism.
Which then puts you into a situation where your financial and housing security is dependent on a relationship working.
No thanks. That's not a nice incentive.
Imagine mandatory drug tests, ideological compliance checks, etc... in order to receive your pay check. That may be extreme but it also may not. I have no idea.
This begs the question of what alternatives could be? Irrespective of whether they’re good or bad, I’m curious what others would have to share.
> Imagine mandatory drug tests, ideological compliance checks, etc... in order to receive your pay check. That may be extreme but it also may not. I have no idea.
Have you ever worked at a retail job? They not only drug test you regularly, they also have you take personality tests to determine your likelihood to be a good or bad employee. For me that was 15 years ago. Now places have automated systems checking your social networks for subversive/non-friendly talk, cameras on you 24/7 in the workplace.
> This begs the question of what alternatives could be?
The solution to "we don't trust the government to do something the private sector can't do" is to improve the government, which is something that we can actually do.
Lots of non-tech employees have to deal with that on a regular basis from their job.
> "Giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached"
So I think in this context we should be talking about that, and not some other definition.
Once they are accepted into the program, you could offer to immediately buy them out, for say, $24k in cash for signing over their rights to the monthly payments.
If YC backs out once they've taken the buyout, they're saddled with debt and likely forced into bankruptcy. It would leave them worse off than before.
If YC doesn't back out, the loan provider can pocket a hefty profit.
A better experiment than $X cash per month to N families would be to spend that $X*N on corn that would otherwise be exported, and labor and transport to distribute ration packs to the experimental group. The control group can get some coupons for up to $3 off a 5# bag of corn meal. You can then also see how fast the price of a 5# bag of corn meal goes up to $2.99 .
Or spend up to $X per month on the experimental group's metered utilities, in the following order: water, electric, natgas (if available), other municipal-owned utilities, then phone/ISP, with anything remaining distributed as prepaid vehicle fuel cards. The power company can't exactly raise your rates if it finds out you, specifically, got a windfall, and the landlord can't raise your rent if you're getting paid in kWh, Mbps, gallons, and cubic yards.
I think it is very important that whatever the basic income is distributed as not be easily convertible to the currency used to pay rents and make general purchases of goods and services. Rent-seeking always happens wherever it is possible.
Only a handful of entities (like US federal govt) can administer a trustworthy UBI program (and that too, only for a limited set of people).
Not many articles, but it seems to have been relatively successful.
https://www.demos.org/blog/1/19/14/cherokee-tribes-basic-inc...
There are 325 million people in the United States. If we give each of them a "basic income" of $1,000 per month (which is bare bones subsistence basic income), the accumulated cost would be $12,000 per year times 325 million people, or $3.9 trillion per year.
The entire US federal budget is already $4.094 trillion. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_federal_bud...), and once you account for things like defense, interest on the national debt, and Medicare that we'd still have to pay for, it's still looking like we would have to add maybe $3 trillion to the annual budget. (You can get really deep into the weeds on this: for example, even if you replace some or all of Social Security with UBI, some Social Security recipients receive more than $1000 per month, so you would need to top them up to the same levels they're already receiving because of the time-honored principle of The United States Government Does Not Welch On Its Debts).
So here comes the other side of the argument: "you can just raise taxes on rich people to make up for that 3 trillion dollar shortfall!". Yeah, but you can already raise taxes on rich people.
The steelman version of that argument is more like, "even if we give away 4 trillion dollars, we can set up the tax brackets so we get some of it back, so the total cost is less than 4 trillion". OK, cool, let's do some napkin math. It looks like $100,000 is around the 75th percentile of income in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...), and that's a big round number where people definitely shouldn't be receiving public assistance anymore, so let's make that the break-even point where we tax back all of the UBI we give away in the first place, which means we get to cut our UBI budget by at least 25% (since only 75% of the population gets any), and maybe let's throw in another 12.5% for gradually taxing back some of the UBI for people in the 50th-75th percentiles, too. So our $4 trillion expenditure is now $2.5 trillion, and let's assume we can write off the same trillion dollars as before by canceling out existing welfare and entitlements, so now you're adding a net $1.5 trillion annual expenditure.
That actually seems doable. This would also mean that providing a UBI for ten years would cost $15 trillion. So, OK, let's accept for the sake of argument that the federal government is going to spend $15 trillion over the course of the next ten years to make everyone's lives better. Is this really the best way? Or could you do something like:
* Repair and replace damaged and worn out US infrastructure: $2 trillion (https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2018/0118/Why-fixing-US-i...), much of which will create jobs and stimulate enough economic activity to pay itself off in the long run.
* A manned mission to Mars: At most, $1 trillion (http://time.com/money/4765718/travel-mars-price-cost-tourism...), much of which will create jobs.
* ITER, the best-funded effort to develop fusion power, costs about $20 billion (http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/updated-panel-backs-i...). Spend $250 billion on a Apollo/Manhattan Project scale effort to develop low cost energy solutions, either from fusion or other projects. (It'll create jobs!)
* It would cost $10 billion to build a Lofstrom loop, but since the federal government is doing it and we've never done anything like that before, let's 10x that. That's another $100 billion. (And even more jobs!)
And you still have $11.5 trillion left to either spend on even more extravagant government projects or eat a decent chunk out of the $21 trillion national debt (https://www.usgovernmentdebt.us/). And in addition to creating more than enough jobs for everyone who needs one, we get to potentially solve some of the most important long-term problems for human civilization, repair all of our infrastructure, land on goddamn Mars, and knock out half of our national debt.
Doesn't it make more sense to make it $1,000 per household + $100/person?
IMHO UBI fails for one basic human reason: people are lazy. Way too many people would sit around all day watching TV if they didn't have to go to work. There would be a labor shortage. This only works in some future where we have robots to do literally every menial job. Even then it's still likely a bad idea from a mental health perspective. People without a sense of purpose or accomplishment are going to become depressed, and self starters are the exception not the rule.
The average cost of raising a child is about $1000 per month, and though it would probably be less if you're destitute enough to subsist off of UBI, I'm not sure that having even more kids is a winning move. The Child Tax Credit is more than $1000 already.
But it looks like children are 25% of the US population, and reducing the expenditure by another 25% doesn't really make a huge dent, to be honest.
Not true. The few real studies of basic income all demonstrate that people, on the whole, do not stop working.
It’s great to see a private company trying to influence public policy through privately funded, transparent, data driven experimentation.
Instead of traditional money driven lobbying(now called non market activity in business school) which I abhor.
There's no shortage of frameworks and differing philosophies on the matter of taxation of the UBI. But generally speaking, no, the $1000 would be considered tax-free as for all intents and purposes, it's a gift from the coffers of government's treasury.
Income generated outside of the UBI however, is taxed because well.. it's income and not a gift.
If the income is truly universal (i.e., not means tested), then it will almost certainly be taxed so that higher income individuals pay back a higher percentage of the income.
So, same family working for the $1,000 will have to pay more overall taxes than the one receiving the $1,000 from the YC program? It doesn't seem really fair.
This is an assumption, rooted in the belief that people are poor because they are lazy, and it is wrong. There are numerous studies which disprove this assumption and I have yet to see a study which supports it.
> 1. If you give everyone a basic monthly income, what’s stopping everyone else who provides services (i.e. housing) from just increasing prices by however much the income is, thus negating the free money in the first place.
While a UBI would raise the median income within an economy, if it was funded out of income tax then it would be neutral with respect to the mean available income, which is more what prices respond to.
> What would make more sense are price controls to bring down costs, like housing and utilities.
That's a really terrible idea. Free-market competition is better. Public ownership and provision of services is also better. Price controls on private markets, however, is genuinely the the worst of all worlds. It also does nothing whatsoever to help people at the bottom of the economic ladder, who don't have access to money at all.
This seems like an argument that breaks when one looks at the details of the markets involved. A landlord who owns low-income units doesn't care about average income. The landlord knows the income of their tenants and knows that they suddenly are able to afford more rent and so that landlord raises the rent to be able to take part in the windfall.
IE, your argument would only work is housing units has efficient, elastic supply and demand like candy or something, where rising income taxes for the wealthy would reduce their demand for low-income units in the central cites. But we know the wealthy's demand for such units already near zero and the demand of the poor for such units is going to be constant.
A compression of income distribution (raising the floor/median without changing mean) means that low-income residents are more likely able to afford to rent units at a tier higher if the price for value not of low-income apartments gets worse (now, if this happens a lot in practice, it drives up prices at the next tier, but the fact that it can itself is a constraint on price increases in the bottom tier.)
And this can be interated at each level until you reach the tiers with net payers, and realize that, yes, their decline in demand,even though it isn't directly the same units as the lowest tier, has enough effect on the lowest tier, through a chain of incone tiers with overlapping markets, even though the top tier doesn't overlap with the bottom.
Unless each tier goes up in value by an amount proportionate to what landlords expect the wind-fall to be. The effect of increased rent isn't just going to be at the lowest income but will happen as each landlord acts accordingly.
Landlord don't have to play by some fair rules of economics or something. Instead they optimize their income in the obvious fashion. Rents would rise in unit up to the level where taxes begin reduce total incomes (those would be mostly home and condo owners at that point I assume).
No, that's literally exactly what I addressed. Unless, by “the wind-fall” you mean the amount extractable not the amount of the net benefit to their current tenant base, in which cases yes, that's exactly what I addressed as to why it is not the full net benefit and why those who are not beneficiaries before considering induced rent increases are generally going to be net beneficiaries after such increases, too.
> Landlord don't have to play by some fair rules of economics or something.
Landlords aren't magically immune from economics, either.
The amount extractable is pretty much the net benefit. Maybe a little less but not that much (ie, your argument above is faulty). This is because landlords can raise prices immediately. the vast majority of tenants can't just jump to other apartment on a moments notice AND because there simply aren't a bunch higher-priced apartment available - these apartments are occupied by already by higher income tenant.
No, it's not.
> This is because landlords can raise prices immediately.
Assuming the absence of all of lease contracts and rent control and legal notice period for rent increase (e.g., California’s 30-day notice for an increase that would bring the rent to more than 10% higher than the lowest rent charged in the preceding 12 months) and available competitive units, sure.
> there simply aren't a bunch higher-priced apartment available - these apartments are occupied by already by higher income tenant.
Sure there are, except in the tightest markets. It's true that housing supply can be a problem, particularly in done local markets, but that's an issue with it without UBI.
The intent of most UBI supporters is that money be spent according to the perceived needs of the recipients. Centralized control of use is an explicit non-goal.
In fact, one big argument of UBI supporters is that aid recieved even in restricted form will often be redirected in that manner with overhead for the mechanisms of repurposing the benedits, in any case, such that attempts to control how aid is spent are often just expending extra public resources in administrative functions with the net effect of reducing the value of benefits without controlling their use.
Let people be people, the world has more than enough to take care of everyone even when they're doing whatever they want.
I would have phrased it differently, namely that people at the bottom of the economic ladder lack the education to wisely spend UBI and it will end up getting wasted or siphoned by predators. I've worked closely with poor people in my church, helping them learn to budget and such, and what I've found is that more often than not, they had hundreds of dollars each month tied up in services they didn't use, many of them very deceptive and predatory (i.e. the letter has red ink "amount due" stamped on it, even though it wasn't even a bill!)
one problem with this is that 1) free market with no regulation leads to monopoly when only one competitor remains and 2) efficient markets are purely theoretical due to impossibility of having perfect information in the real world.
This isn't theoretical; it can and does happen -- just not for every type of good or service, and rarely by accident. A well-functioning market has to be designed.
Analogy: the freest roads of all would have no lane markings or regulations. This would give you "freedom from" regulation, but wouldn't give you the "freedom to" do very much. Roads with rules and regulations aren't "un-free"; they just prioritize "freedom to" over "freedom from".
And in some places, of course, mass transit just works better. Markets, too, aren't for everything. But when government is going to intervene to control prices, without actually taking any responsibility for the provision of said goods and services themselves, then those price controls quickly become divorced from reality, and do little besides create deadweight losses in some places and black markets in the rest. That's a lose-lose proposition.
Free market competition is better for some things, not everything. It's terrible, for instance, for medical services, as one usually doesn't have much opportunity to shop around when there's an emergency.
You need no further evidence of what happens when you dump funny money into the market beyond looking at the rocketing cost of housing and education. The current result is what you get when everyone has access to a fixed amount of money.
It doesn't level the playing field, it just elevates it.
> It doesn't level the playing field, it just elevates it.
Raising the lower bounds of poverty sounds like a good outcome!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax#Economic_proper...
That's...actually what many proponents specifically intend, though.
> If you give everyone a basic monthly income, what’s stopping everyone else who provides services (i.e. housing) from just increasing prices by however much the income is, thus negating the free money in the first place.
Competition for market goods, the lack of incentive to do so (or for regulators to allow it) for public services including regulated public utilities.
There's way too much latent demand for housing in booming cities to just build your way out. Without rent control, there will be people not benefiting from the boom that are just bled dry by rising costs.
I just mean, there are lots of people that would move to SF if they could afford it. This mass of potential immigrants will counter an attempt to just build your way out.
Unless you mean a real substantive change to the city e.g. building 30,000 apartments/year.
Price control? Is this some sort of a joke?
No, UBI only works if you institute price controls, or if there is a mass migration to rural areas, Otherwise, it just sparks an inflationary spiral. The spiral is even quicker if UBI is 'adjusted' for regional cost of living.
There is good reason to think that a tax-supported UBI at any level would, in fact, lead to price inflation for goods disproportionately in demand at the low end of the income scale, such that the net benefit of a UBI to the lowest-income recipients would be less than would be expected by consideration of the nominal benefit and pre-policy price levels, sure.
The idea that it would just spark an inflationary spiral, OTOH, something that needs some support.
Fair point. My assumption is that any political movement that institutes UBI in the first place would add automatic indexing to CPI either in the initial bill or soon after the first inflationary surge. Even if (miraculously) resisted at the federal level, the pressure to automatically index in urban areas would be overwhelming and even a few major cities with local indexing laws would still spark the inflationary spiral.
I'm gonna go with "maybe" - there are a whole lot of details there and there may well be good plans in that space.
I'd like to get back to this when I have a bit more bandwidth.