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A public good is a technical term in economics. One useful way of categorizing goods is to place them along two axes - excludability and rivalry. Public goods a
by robto 11y ago
A public good is a technical term in economics. One useful way of categorizing goods is to place them along two axes - excludability and rivalry. Public goods are categorized non-excludable and non-rival. Non-excludable means you can't stop people who don't pay for the good from consuming it - like clean air. Non-rival means that one person's consumption of a good does not affect another person's. Digital goods are typically non-rival.
A cash transfer doesn't really meet these conditions - it's excludable, in that you can restrict access to citizens or to whomever. And it's rival - there are only so many dollars to go around.
That said, I think inflation is a very real concern for any basic income scheme.
- boxy310 11y agoAgreed. Another way of looking at it is that a pure cash exchange would filter through the market demand for all goods, and as a result the nominal value of all goods would increase through the mechanism of inflation, not just land rents per the Henry George Theorem. However, there is an input consideration of identifying where this cash infusion is coming from, whether from printing money or from selling accrued assets on the open market (as what the YCombinator crew would probably be doing, if they don't already have liquid assets devoted to this endeavor).