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Comment by runawaybottle | Hacker News Reader

Won’t it just be negated with increased cost of living? If people get 1000 a month free, you better believe that rent starts at 1000.

The free money will never do what it’s supposed to do in the long run. It’s better to just give the actual service for free (healthcare, college, transportation).

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1. Inflation is primarily a monetary phenomenon. So as long as you pay for UBI through increased taxes rather than by borrowing or printing the money, it won't cause overall inflation. Certainly it will cause local distortions -- some stuff will go up in price but that should be balanced by the stuff that goes down in price.

2. Another possible theory is that UBI will allow people to move away from expensive cities to areas that are cheap to live in. $1K a month won't go far in SF, but you might be able to live on that in the middle of nowhere without having to fin a job. So decreased demand for housing in expensive cities means that UBI might cause housing prices there to go down.

3. Housing problems are fairly orthogonal to UBI. In pretty much every other market supply can rise to match increased demand so that prices stay close to their marginal cost of production. We need to fix our housing pricing problems UBI or no UBI.

Probably the biggest change I expect is very undesirable jobs will either become automated or high paying because you have people thinking "I hate working as a toilet cleaner but it pays so much its worth it" Or we will end up with self cleaning toilets. There is no longer a whole class of people who will work any job no matter how shit and for the minimum wage because they are forced to.

Is that totally guaranteed though? It’s important to remember that the landlords as well will be getting the 1000$ UBI. So yes, there will be landlords starting their rent at $1000, but there will also be landlords who start lower because they too have become more enriched from the UBI and don’t need to squeeze the margins as much anymore.

Fair point, but if I had to counter I’d point to egregious wealth accumulation in our society, which is in it’s distilled form is just greed.

The greedy could siphon away most of the UBI, bringing us back to square one. UBI suffers from the assumption that we have a system with the right incentive structures. We kind of don’t from what I’m seeing.

but the only way to pay for the dividend is through taxing the greedy so even if they do that's a plus, again the greedy/enterprising are what make everything we love like these devices.

>landlords as well will be getting the 1000$ UBI

They get it and then it is instantly removed via taxes so their overall profits from UBI were $0. The only difference between UBI and unemployment/welfare is you don't have to apply for it, its simply calculated and distributed by the tax system.

Of course it would. Over time UBI would destroy the value of our currency, and those who use the dollar as their reserve currency would get wrecked as well. IMO an Implementation of UBI would require the creation of a new currency.

Won’t it just be negated with increased cost of living?

Not unless landlords collude to fix prices. Competition will keep prices down, the same way that gas isn't always $4/gallon even though people will buy almost as much at that price as at $1.

That's a very hand-wavy and ridiculously over-simplified way to just dismiss an idea out of hand. May I suggest learning even the first thing about a new idea before so confidently asserting it could never possibly work?

Why would UBI raise rents? The cost of rent is based on supply and demand, and UBI doesn’t make people need more bedrooms.

The rent prices are high (low supply), so whoever has the most money gets it. If you only have 1000 from UBI, but the guy next to you has 1000 plus the 1000 from UBI, guess what the new price is?

Build another house, and then problem solved. Why start with the assumption that supply needs to be low forever? That is actually a very new problem in housing due to regulatory capture, a long history of terrible zoning laws, and a tragedy of the commons that there are always many people ready to oppose a new house but no resident of the unbuilt house able to counter that force and argue for it.

With better policy we really could end the current housing shortage in our biggest & richest cities.

But in America there are more empty houses than there are homeless people. Supply is not low. Maybe rent would go up in some markets (eg Bay Area), but people can move somewhere else. That’s the point of having a market system.

Yes UBI decreases market inefficiency, but the effect would be smallest on inelastic markets like housing. You’d see the biggest impact in the markets for the life-improving items/services that people with less money can’t afford right now, everything from fresh/healthy foods to nice shoes. The prices of those things would go up, but it would reflect an increase in demand.

And it will obviously never just sit at $1000.

There will be a riot every other week to change the UBI payments.

"Too high!" "Too low!"

Has anyone ever rioted because of too much money from the government?

Not every week. Eventually the poeple paying for UBI will leave or guillotine over their head will be used and body will be looted. Rinse and repeat every-time equity is tried.

that's an awfully sad and ill-informed perspective. egalitarian communities have existed to varying sizes and durations for the existence of humanity. if anything we are wired for altruism.

From some of the comments here, and from talking to people in the past month, it occurs to me that 2020 seems to be causing people to remove their rose-colored glasses. It's hard to believe that the web page for the link below may, in some ways, have actually underestimated just how bad things would get in 2020:

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/615163630343397490/

Of course, only some of the disasters of 2020 have been beyond our control. However, in the face of so much calamity, it's soul-crushing that so much of the suffering in the USA in 2020 is self-inflicted. Think I'm overreacting?

https://medium.com/@mtracey/two-months-since-the-riots-and-s...

life is a process, pain is a constant, struggle is a constant. the fact we are witness to so much of others pain when individually we are comparatively spared means that progress is being made. And remember could be we'll see the yellowstone caldera could blow or a gamma ray burst wipe us out.

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