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).
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).