I do wonder if rather than UBI we should be pursuing UBH (Universal Basic Housing). Cheap food is a solved problem for everyone but the very poorest, housing isn't.
In the same vein, all that a UBI / UBH would do is shift around allocation of actually-limited resources while causing inefficiency, waste and accounting headaches for everybody. What's more, you'll be shifting those limited resources away from the most materially productive segment of society - the middle class - and onto the underclass, who is not going to all of a suddenly take over the burden of mass production, since that requires many years of education and training. So what I'm saying is you'll start to get goods shortages too.
The whole system is an intricate jigsaw puzzle with a billion moving pieces. People keep suggesting we fix it by hitting it with a hammer and setting parts of it on fire.
So is it better to build enough houses or enough Televisions? Right now the richest parts of the world are flooded with consumer goods but starved of decent housing. This isn't just a problem for the poor, I know plenty of high earning middle class people who have to put up with poor housing.
More inefficiency than we already have?
> accounting headaches for everybody.
What headaches would they be?
> goods shortages
In the developed world we already have more stuff and kinds of stuff than most of us need. Reducing the supply of new mobile phone designs is not going to materially reduce anyone's quality of life.
A lot of the world just needs the kind of stuff we already have, and we already know how to make that stuff. As William Gibson said "The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed"
Yes, more than there already is. This is the standard thing that happens whenever there is massive redistribution of anything by government fiat. Stuff gets redistributed arbitrarily, people who need it don't get it, poeple who don't need it get too much of it, stuff is lost via administrative error or outright fraud or political finagling, people being careless with billions of dollars in other people's money because it's not in their KPI, etc.
Note that most things are not literally on fire currently and there is no looting. Those things are not guaranteed.
>In the developed world we already have more stuff and kinds of stuff than most of us need.
Really, now. Do you think we'll be OK if we stop the mass production of fertilizers and concrete for a while? Just a few months until things settle down? How about meds? Those tie up a lot of man-hours and medically trained people to produce, and we could definitely use those people elsewhere (or they could go take long, UBI-piad holidays).
Tell that to someone living in SV or London.