A UBI in the US might cause what you’re suggesting, since there tend to be more restrictions on needs vs wants. i.e. no one will stop you from building a superyacht if you want, but there’s a lot of artificial barriers to building cheap apartments. So if you shift demand from things rich people want to things poor people want, you might get a lot of the money transferred to the owners of the last few cheap apartments that were allowed to be built.
This seems like more of an argument against that kind of law that outlaws anything that rich people don’t want though, not an argument against UBI.
I think my concerns hold even if it’s easy to build things. Like suppose there are 100 people and 100 houses. Houses have normally distributed annual costs between $100 and $1000. Before UBI, people have annual income of between $100 and $1000, so in theory everyone can occupy a house (and in this simplified example, assume no one needs anything else).
Then we introduce UBI of $50 a year. It seems to me that all annual housing costs should increase by $50 to capture the free money rather than allow it to be spent on anything else.
This is a very simplified example, but I think it’s worth figuring out how UBI can do anything other than simply cause inflation.
Once you’ve assumed that housing is all that people need or want, and the supply of housing is fixed, then clearly nothing of importance can possibly change. So I think the example is over-simplified.
An important piece of this is that shifting the relative distribution of money also shifts the distribution of real resources. So absent legal restrictions, if more people have money they want to spend on housing, you should expect more housing to be built, not just for the existing supply to get more expensive (and in exchange, you should expect less of whatever the people paying for the UBI want produced; regardless of whether they pay via taxes or inflation).
A UBI in the US might cause what you’re suggesting, since there tend to be more restrictions on needs vs wants. i.e. no one will stop you from building a superyacht if you want, but there’s a lot of artificial barriers to building cheap apartments. So if you shift demand from things rich people want to things poor people want, you might get a lot of the money transferred to the owners of the last few cheap apartments that were allowed to be built.
This seems like more of an argument against that kind of law that outlaws anything that rich people don’t want though, not an argument against UBI.
I think my concerns hold even if it’s easy to build things. Like suppose there are 100 people and 100 houses. Houses have normally distributed annual costs between $100 and $1000. Before UBI, people have annual income of between $100 and $1000, so in theory everyone can occupy a house (and in this simplified example, assume no one needs anything else).
Then we introduce UBI of $50 a year. It seems to me that all annual housing costs should increase by $50 to capture the free money rather than allow it to be spent on anything else.
This is a very simplified example, but I think it’s worth figuring out how UBI can do anything other than simply cause inflation.
Once you’ve assumed that housing is all that people need or want, and the supply of housing is fixed, then clearly nothing of importance can possibly change. So I think the example is over-simplified.
An important piece of this is that shifting the relative distribution of money also shifts the distribution of real resources. So absent legal restrictions, if more people have money they want to spend on housing, you should expect more housing to be built, not just for the existing supply to get more expensive (and in exchange, you should expect less of whatever the people paying for the UBI want produced; regardless of whether they pay via taxes or inflation).