Rent is only high because of artificial scarcity of real estate. The scarcity only exists because building new housing is decided neither by supply and demand nor central government planning, but by the people who accumulate more capital if housing isn’t built.
We really need to push for the feds to step in and start constructing government housing against the will of the NIMBYs and local and state governments then.
California has finally started forcing local governments to build more housing to stop the NIMBYs bit it’s still going to take so many years for housing to catch up even if they start now.
The Maoist uprising against the landlords was the most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, leading to almost totally equal redistribution of the land amongst the peasantry.
That depends on the housing market. If you have a surplus in housing, rent will remain stable because tenants will move if their landlord increases rent.
If you have a deficit in housing and more people look for a place to stay than there are available places, then tenants cannot move. Landlords and other businesses in deficit markets like healthcare will take all additional income.
To be clear here, while they advocate for UBI this isn’t really a study on the topic as much as it is on direct cash payments to the homeless. Which has been supported by tons of different research in Canada, London, so many places I can’t even remember them all.
We tried ubi during lock downs Here and it not only failed catastrophically but our government had to give up on billions of dollars people aren’t eligible for it caused catastrophic nearly unrecoverable inflation and people are now walking away from their mortgages that they can no longer afford
The government giving out money to people so that they could stay housed/fed did not cause record inflation. The capitalists massively hiked prices, then said that inflation made them do it. They then declared record profits afterwards. Capitalists scooped up all that money with ease. They then did their little song and dance of, “We’re all in this together. We’re just widdle beans trying to survive like you.”
If the government doing stuff for people over a 2 year period causes massive amounts of inflation, wouldn’t decades of handouts to capitalists cause record hyper-inflation? Inflation doesn’t happen because the government does stuff. Inflation happens because capitalists will pounce on any opportunity to eek more money out of you, then blame you for having too much money.
Recent inflation was actually caused by lending rates dropping to zero, investments being made on that basis and now that lending rates are normalized costs are increasing, and now prices are increasing to maintain profits.
Maybe because the people who hoard wealth are like everybody else and too few want to share? Why expect the billionaires to share if normal people don’t share?
Right now is the first time in history since city state times that the citizens can talk and vote together.
If people choose to share their income, they can do it now. The debate hasn’t happened yet.
Have an open register among participants for who participates and how much they pay.
Then members are incentivized to increase the income of other members. You also have a pool of people for other projects like building cheap new housing.
There is no horded wealth. If you hoard wealth, the Fed will print money until liquidity is restored. The only money that counts is the one in circulation.
Regular citizens circulate enough money to get UBI going.
Jeff Bezos is rich but he cannot spend his wealth unless he is willing to give up control over Amazon. As long as he sticks to that power, his income is zero.
Similarly, if you have money in securities, no money flows.
So to finance UBI, the wages of the citizens are more important than the wealth of billionaires.
That burns, especially seeing your comment frequency. But I would be a little bit proud if I am only annoying but not wrong.
I care about UBI and I think the movement is stuck because they expect politicians to resolve it and billionaires to pay. That won’t happen. It hurts to accept it but the sooner acceptance happens the sooner UBI is possible.
I think my biggest problem with these tests (not the idea of UBI) is that they go entirely based on what the recipients say. There’s not really any indication that fact checking is done to confirm they actually are living somewhere now, or they did get their cars fixed, etc.
I’m confident that the money helped, because obviously it would, but I wish we could get some actual solid data on how much it helped. The cynic in me believes that desperate people getting 1000$/mo will embellish how much it helps in order to keep getting the money, when in reality they need 1500$ or 2000$ to afford housing in Denver.
I’m not sure what definition of UBI you’re using, but not all forms of UBI need to cover the entirety of living expenses. UBI is just having income without strings attached. This very study is showing that even small amounts of money can help people get out of shitty situations.
Also as someone who lives in Dever, it’s not that expensive. Sure $1500+ is what you’ll pay around LoDo, but there are plenty of cheaper places.
I’d love to show this to people who say “but lazy people will be getting paid for nothing” or “competition is human nature” that capitalists made the fuck up, but it’ll probably go over their heads, or they’ll conveniently say that the test was not done properly
Every single study on UBI finds that it is a good idea that benefits both the recipients and society as a whole, but because it contradicts the dominant ideology it can’t be allowed to happen.
If people have UBI, you can get away with paying less though. That's how walmart does it; just encourage your workers to get welfare so they stay alive enough to work more
And that’s honestly my proposal for it. Basically, create something like UBI (my preference is NIT) that ensures everyone is over the poverty level, eliminate minimum wage, and have benefits phase out for some reasonable definition of “living wage” (say, 2x the poverty level, maybe 3x).
Working would never make you worse off, and people wouldn’t feel obligated to take crappy jobs if the pay isn’t there.
We could also eliminate many other forms of welfare at the same time and just increase benefits accordingly.
Agreed, I certainly wouldn’t touch Medicare or Medicaid. I’d also probably leave unemployment insurance as is, and this would kick in afterward.
But I think it could replace Social Security, food assistance, housing assistance, etc. And I think we could fund it by lifting the income cap on Social Security, but I’d need to run the numbers to be sure.
I'd say some disability benefits as well. Simply getting by can be more expensive when you can't do basic tasks yourself, even if you have the best universal health care possible.
Which we all know would happen IMMEDIATELY in lockstep with any widespread rollout of UBI, and any complaint would be met with half the country screeching “FREE MARKET REEEEEE”
Rent Control can only have one outcome. Decreased amount of available new or renovated rentals which coupled with an ever increasing demand for housing, creates some of the housing shortages we see in larger cities today.
UBI can be an effective way to fight poverty, and would be an even more effective way to combat poverty if we implemented a Negative Income tax whereby all welfare programs are rolled into the funding.
And how did that work out for the estimated 15-55 million people that died of starvation as a result of the "equitable distribution of land ownership"?
What a childish response. So the famine didn’t occur because it’s documented on Wikipedia?
The reasons for the famine are well understood and documented. I don’t think defending Mao is the way to go in regards to our modern housing crisis.
The housing market issue is also well understood and documented. We know companies and investors have been buying more and more houses, driving up prices. We know wages have not kept pace with rising housing costs. We know the gap between rich and poor has been widening year after year. Why the fuck are we derailing the conversation?
First off, I’m not denying the famine happened, aim just denying Wikipedia’s framing. The death counts are exaggerated and many were connected to devastation caused by the Civil War.
Second off, I am not advocating we do mid 20th century agriculture practices and kill the sparrows after doing land reform.
Rent Control can only have one outcome. Decreased amount of available new or renovated rentals which coupled with an ever increasing demand for housing, creates some of the housing shortages we see in larger cities today.
Only if you assume that private landlords are the only way to supply housing.
I agree with not measuring net worth but how are you planning on measuring individual societal value? That just sounds ripe for discrimination and elitism.
Exactly. If organisations (private, public and other) had to maximise for social betterment, they would release annual reports measuring it. There might even be entire industries dedicated to auditing measurements of social betterment.
But no, we're stuck using a system of 'value' based on the prestige of owning shiny rocks and control of the areas where those shiny rocks are found. And finding new uses for things and people that aren't the desired shiny rocks so that you may demand and acquire more shiny rocks as others in the same time duration.
If a majority of countries can successfully ditch the gold standard and allow fiat currency - as they did a century ago, that means the world is also able to redefine what fiat currencies measure. There's nothing actually stopping us from requiring social and environmental impact to be included in the calculation of financial valuations, except the people who have a vested interest in keeping the current equations.
Tbf, it's difficult to break programming. If your whole life you're raised in a society that measures your worth by your "hard work", then accepting that you don't need work to be happy is difficult for most. Most will continue voting against their own interests until there's a watershed moment. My bet is on unemployment hitting >30% due to AI.
If 30% of the population has to be on social security and can't be hired anymore, it would surprise me if nothing changed. Unless of course they blamed immigrants and minorities. They always serve as good scape goats.
The problem is the definition of “work”. There’s lots of things a person can do that both require a lot of effort and produce real benefit to society that are difficult or impossible to make money from, and therefore they aren’t “work”. Raising children being the most obvious example.
Indeed, work is defined by most people as "employment", but there's a lot of different work out there that is beneficial to the person and society as a whole, that isn't remunerated.
I’ve yet to see a study at a scale large enough to impact the local economy. Will the results hold when everyone gets monthly cash payments, or will rent go through the roof and that’s about it?
Kind of a weird argument, isn’t it? If we did the opposite instead, it’s not as if you’d expect rents to fall – on the contrary, rent would go up in response to the added financial burden on landlords. Setting that hypothetical aside, wouldn’t a generalized inflation of rents be an acceptable tradeoff for reducing homelessness and untethering the 50+% of young adults who still live with their parents to move and work in more economically efficient environments?
While I actually consider multi-generational housing a good thing, let’s ignore that since the reason people aren’t moving out is financial and not social.
The question is whether UBI is the best way to solve that problem (and others) and I have yet to see data that can be reasonably said to actually be universal for a region. The closest thing I know of is Alaska, and their oil payments are too small and their economy too remote to say much about larger payments in a larger economy.
To me, because money has a social and psychological value to it, what works on an individual level has no guarantee to transfer to a societal level. I would be very interested to see UBI practiced on an entire economic zone, but good luck getting anyone to volunteer.
So what if there were 100 or more small scale experiments in 50 different countries, in similar conditions. I won't be playing with the money of the entire nation|state|county|city to possibly lose it and not get elected again!
I want vaccines to be tested on 30% of the population to see if it works.
We should be putting this prototype hardware in the hands of 40% of the population to see if there are any side effects before deciding whether to legalise it.
We will do a double blind test on 50% of the population with these new safety regulations to see if there's an impact on incidences. The study would be invalid otherwise.
Models and small scale experiments are for wimps. I, the ruler of the democratic country, declare an experiment shall be run at national scale! The economy of region X with will not be comparable to that of the rest of 90% of country!
Uh, the key issue is that it’s very unclear whether the results will hold at scale, since you’re suggesting a modification to society. There’s no (or very little) social component to the effectiveness of a vaccine or a new tool. Money is fundamentally a social construct and so what works in isolation or very small groups might not work the same way at large scale.
If a country with a population of around a million (or even as small as 100k) enacted UBI I would take those results to be representative of a societal change. So far I’ve only seen studies where a few people embedded in a larger society are given money, and that’s not the same thing.
You have to remember that industrialized countries already have a systems where people get money for “nothing,” but those quotes do a lot of psychological heavy lifting. Disability, unemployment, retirement, food stamps, etc. The difference being that it’s not universal and each payout is either “earned,” temporary, or a pity case. As such, the psychology behind that money just isn’t the same.
I’m interested in UBI, I just want to see results that can actually be reasonably transferred to a population the size of my country (350 million) before I make hard statements about its effects.
If a country with a population of around a million (or even as small as 100k) enacted UBI I would take those results to be representative of a societal change.
I honestly doubt you would. The typical arguments of:
it's not comparable to a country of 350M, they're barely as big as $cityWithOver1Million
their society is very different from ours
their implementation is different from what we could ever manage
the circumstances were different
would come around.
You're making exemplary conservative arguments to stalemate progress by creating a chicken and egg problem.
Won't accept results of change in a small environment because they aren't representative of change in large environment
Demand results of change in a large environment before applying them to large environment
Won't apply changes to large environment because results of change in large environment don't exist
You just made up a bunch of arguments I would never make. Please don’t put words in my mouth. I can’t help it if my current stance is an argument made by people who have no interest in UBI at all. Fuck, I want UBI to work as advertised, it would be a very simple and easy solution to a lot of problems (though it obviously wouldn’t be a 100% solve for all of them).
If we can get a small economic zone that’s in control of its own currency to run UBI, those results would be likely to transfer to any other larger economy. Really the only requirement is that the country must be in control of its own monetary and fiscal policy and the program must actually be universal.
That’s about it. Why would anyone work for $20k/yr when they could get $12k for free? They wouldn’t. So those jobs would bump to $30k+, and a domino affect would occur. Nothing would be achieved other than the devaluing of the American dollar, which would lead to a loss of jobs, increased poverty, and guess what else - increased homelessness.
There was a UBI experiment in canada that was a huge success and of course the tories axed it as soon as they had the chance. Conservatives need to [extremely long bleep] … [yeah still bleeping] … … [still going] … [leeeeep] -yeah i’m going to have to redact this in post.
This is the only experiment that comes up from Googling Manitoba UBI, and it doesn’t seem to match what you say. A study of about 2k people, definitely not the whole population, and this article lists quite a number of positive statements about it.
It was 2500 families and encompassed about 10000 pretty much the whole town in some way and was over 4 years. The place was picked because at that time it was bit remote and somewhat isolated on that external forces would have minimal effect. It was determined the cost economically was far higher than the returns. Productivity did fall which was huge in that if this was instituted over a whole country and the result is less productivity, there is absolutely zero way to pay for it. The main take from the initial 4 year study was productively fell less than predicted but it certainly made live easier for the people getting it.
This was likely the biggest study ever done and the most controlled IMO. It did improve people’s health who recieved this money but that was at the expense of the rest of the country paying for it basically all thing being equal, they would get less health care.
Ubi also is payment to everyone. In these examples it is just payment to low or no income people. That is not ubi but simply welfare. Something that is not a bad thing to provide if there is excessive resources to do so.
In the end the project ran for four years, concluding in 1979, but the data collection lasted for only two years and virtually no analysis was done by project staff. New governments at both federal and provincial levels reflected the changing intellectual and economic climate. Neither the Progressive Conservative government of Joe Clark in Ottawa nor Sterling Lyon’s Tories in Manitoba were interested in continuing the GAI experiments. The fate of the original data—boxes and boxes of paper files on families containing questionnaires related to all aspects of social and economic functioning—was unclear. They were stored in an unpublicized location by the Department of National Health and Welfare. In the end, only the Winnipeg sample, and only the labour market aspects of that sample, was ever made available. The Dauphin data, collected at great expense and some controversy from participants in the first large scale social experiment ever conducted in Canada, were never examined.
This study involved using one small town, Dauphin, as a a test for what happens when everyone in the population qualifies for the basic income. The study ran out of money long before the researchers originally thought it would, and the majority of the data wasn’t analyzed until relatively recently.
The general result found in all the experiments was that secondary earners tended to take some part of the increased family income in the form of more time for household production, particularly staying home with newborns. Effectively, married women used the GAI to finance longer maternity leaves. Tertiary earners, largely adolescent males, reduced their hours of work dramatically, but the largest decreases occurred because they began to enter the workforce later. This delay in taking a first job at an older age suggests that some of these adolescent males might be spending more years in school. The biggest effects, that is, could be seen as either an economic cost in the form of work disincentives or an economic benefit in the form of human capital accumulation.
New mothers and teenagers weren’t required to spend as much time working
Money flowed to Dauphin families from MINCOME between 1974 and 1978. During the experiment, Dauphin students in grade 11 seemed more likely to continue to grade 12 than their rural or urban counterparts, while both before and after the experiment they were less likely than their urban counterparts and not significantly more or less likely than their rural counterparts to complete highschool. Grade 11 enrolments as a percentage of the previous year grade 10 enrolments show a similar pattern.
Highschool graduation rates went up
Overall, the measured impact was larger than one might have expected when only about a third of families qualified for support at any one time and many of the supplements would have been small. …At the very least, the suggestive finding that hospitalization rates among Dauphin subjects fell by 8.5 percent relative to the comparison group is worth examining more closely in an era characterized by concern about the increasing burden of health care costs. In 1978, Canada spent $7.5 billion on hospital costs; in 2010 it was estimated to have spent $55 billion—8.5 percent of which adds up to more than $4.6 billion. While we recognize that one must be careful in generalizing potential health system savings, particularly because we use hospitals differently today than we did in 1978, the potential saving in hospital costs associated with a GAI seems worthy of consideration.
And hospitalization rates went down. There were other effects, like small businesses opening during the period of MINCOME and shutting down after, a possible decline in women under 25 having children, but none of this was evaluated for whether it was worth the money or not.
None of those benefits came close to the cost of the program. They ran it for 4 years and the budget yes ran out of money. Could have ran forever because the rest of the country was paying for it but once initiated productively decreased. Likely would have even decreased further but people knew the free money would eventually end.
How do you pay for a program when the local area taxes don’t cover it particularly when the tax income actually decreases once instituted?
None of those benefits came close to the cost of the program
How do you measure the cost-to-benefit of longer maternity leave? Or higher high school graduation rates? Not everything the government does needs to directly make a profit. Just look at roads for an obvious example of that.
once initiated productively decreased. Likely would have even decreased further but people knew the free money would eventually end.
There was only about a 13% decrease in hours worked for the entire family on average, and most of that was women going back to work after a pregnancy later and teenagers not working (probably so they could keep going to school).
How do you pay for a program when the local area taxes don’t cover it particularly when the tax income actually decreases once instituted?
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