Yes! Excellent work. Now there is no incentive for anyone to build housing for our growing population!
UBI is a bad idea.
State-built housing is not necessarily a bad idea.
You can just do the latter and skip the former.
I do see what you mean, I think, now that I’m rereading and contemplating. A monthly stipend probably does more to raise prices than anything useful, unless you also pair it with regulation to stop the wealthy and powerful from taking it all for themselves. And at that point you could have just done those regulations without UBI. Hmm.
Do you think a few lump sum payments over a citizens lifetime would have the same effect? Maybe some large sum paid when you reach age of majority and then again at retirement?
Yes largely correct, but more specifically than "wealthy and powerful," I am referring directly to the landed class, wealthy or not. This type of infusion will ultimately be baked into the cost of land, which will propagate up to rent, then up to wages, then up to goods. The gains will accrue almost entirely to the landed class in the form of higher land rents with no symmetrical increase in costs because land itself does not incur costs.
> Do you think a few lump sum payments over a citizens lifetime would have the same effect? Maybe some large sum paid when you reach age of majority and then again at retirement?
It wouldn't have the same effect but it'd have an analogous effect in the localized markets in which those subsidies are applied. For example, you'd expect the price of land (and so rent → wages → goods) to increase where retiring people congregate. But it'd be less harmful to the exact degree that the subsidy itself is less broadly "helpful."
Rent control is already a thing, and typically good short term but bad long term: renters don't move out because they can't get such low rent elsewhere, and landlords can't afford repairs so things are left broken. It's a great way to create slums over a few generations.
Why, instead of centralised planned economy that failed ans killed millions people many times in history, not just lowering taxes and let people to decide how spend their capital individually? Game theory applied on UBI sounds really like an ugly idea.
As for tools that make citizens obey, the government already has the best one: a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Everything else is child’s play compared to that.
Prices in Vienna are so much more affordable than in comparable European cities - Munich, Hamburg, Berlin to speak of Germany, not to say Madrid, Paris, Barcelone, Milano.
Sometimes (more rarely than people think) a single entity plays both roles, but it's impossible to reason about this space if you conflate the two
Yes, developers build homes to make money. This is how approximately 100% of the housing supply in the US was created.
I know a lot of landlords think they are a persecuted class that is providing a necessary service - but that largely isn't true.
Broadly you can imagine two scenarios for simplicity sake.
1) Housing supply is abundant. Landlords have to compete on service superior maintenance, better units, better locations, etc.). Renting a home behaves like any other service industry that we come to know and love.
2) Housing supply is constrained. The situation plaguing much of the modern world. Land is limited. Landlords earn a higher IRR from jacking rents than they do from buying additional units. The landlords profit from control of the access to a scare resource rather than from providing anything of value.
Plainly: rent-seeking is evil.
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?
It benefits landlords.
I don't know enough about economics these days to know if anyone who knows a lot about thus stuff thinks this is true, but it seems on the face of it to be absurd, since it would mean that pay raises are substantially diminished by rents paid for anything where demand is not elastic. I mean, I'm not insisting that cannot possibly be true, but it seems unlikely ...
The relevance of this is amplified by the fact that land is a required input for all forms of production. People and machines must exist in space, and therefore demand land.
This does not apply to any other asset that we care about.
The housing:land demand ratio is also not fixed, due to multi-level dwellings (hence, for example, Singapore or Hong Kong), or increased density (e.g. ADUs or smaller lots).
I just don't see why you see UBI only affecting owners of a nearly-inelastic resource (land) rather than everything else too (even if to a lesser degree) ?
So same mechanism applies to land, except then there’s no way to spur additional production of land, so the price just goes up.
Re density etc: correct, which is why I’m not arguing this benefits homeowners or building owners, except to the degree they are also landowners. A building owner who does not own the land underneath his building would not benefit much, the person who he pays land rent to will capture nearly all of the upside.
Correct it wouldn't stop landlords from continuing to earn from their properties but it would destroy the incentive to produce additional housing, so nobody wins.
You should take some time to understand this extremely basic distinction before forming such strong conclusions.