11 ms·

UBI proponents should be cognizant of stagflation. During the 1960s and 1970s, demand-side fiscal policy was based upon the Phillips curve, an observed correlat

UBI proponents should be cognizant of stagflation. During the 1960s and 1970s, demand-side fiscal policy was based upon the Phillips curve, an observed correlation between low interest rates and low unemployment. After the oil supply shocks, this observed correlation began to break down as interest rates were lowered to compensate for the rise in fuel costs. By the late 1970s the US was experiencing stagflation, a combination of low interest rates, high inflation, and high unemployment, which should have been impossible according to the Phillips curve. In reality the Phillips curve was too simple. What was happening was that since wage increases came to be anticipated due to the consistent low interest rate/moderate to high inflation environment, producers would preemptively raise prices to soak up all of the wage gains. This led to a wage/price spiral with no actual improvements in productivity. Eventually stagflation was ended by dramatically raising interest rates and triggering a nasty recession. UBI could lead to stagflation because the income allotments and any increases would be according to some formula known ahead of time. This means that producers could anticipate demand and simply raise prices to soak up any income increases. Something to keep in mind when devising these systems.

nerdponx 9y ago
This was my first thought. If you print money on a fixed schedule, the natural market response is to devalue the currency according to the same fixed schedule. Nobody gets any real income; they get a fixed lifetime endowment of buying power, granted in predictable intervals, and the only thing that changes over time is the denomination of the currency. Interesting idea: "universal basic lifetime income", UBLI. But perhaps not what the author was going for. It's been a while since I've done serious economic analysis. Please correct me if I'm wrong. --- edit --- Also, the whole thing is predicated on a web of trust to prevent Sybil attacks. Fine, but PGP has shown pretty conclusively that a web of trust like this is a failed model. A single trust authority makes far more sense for this application. In the PGP case, casual users like myself don't personally know anybody who uses PGP. I would have to go out of my way to acquire a reasonable degree of trust on my key: I'd basically have to start asking people I hardly know "hey can you sign my key?" which I'd rather not do. That's fine, because PGP is for hacker nerds and not everybody needs or wants to be a hacker nerd. The problem, however, is that if this is to be truly universal then you need to guarantee universal access. What if I've been in prison for 5 years, I can't get in contact with any of my family, and my old private key is long lost. So I start up a new account and... what? Who trusts me? I basically have to start asking random people to trust me. So people have to trust each other. Then what's stopping a con artist from going from town to town, getting store owners and locals with bleeding hearts to trust each of his multiple duplicate currencies. The Sybil attack can proceed with trivial social engineering. You're in a Catch-22: either people are skeptical, and the system is decidedly non-inclusive, or people are trusting, and the system is insecure. You need centralized trust: it's the same problem we have today with domain names. You need an authoritative list of valid domains, and a single source of truth for accessing that list. The nice thing about a trust authority is that it doesn't need to be physically centralized. Just record everyone's citizenship on a blockchain like Ethereum. But at this point I'm just speculating.
- jackcosgrove 9y ago
  I am not an economist, and am summarizing the received wisdom on stagflation and tentatively applying it to UBI. If I could put my economist hat on, I would think that the real value of UBI allotments would be constant, as you said, in the best case.
- akvadrako 9y ago
  PGP didn't show that the web of trust is a failed model. PGP sucks from a UI perspective, so it would have failed even if it was centralised. Which it basically is with MIT's keyserver.
- jchrisa 9y ago
  My solution to this is to embed key signing in everyday face-to-face activities. If your wallet gets signed every time you buy something, soon it will have useful identity. https://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/ https://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/
- SubiculumCode 9y ago
  Not an economist, but wouldn't competition keep prices lower? Also, inflation happens when supply cannot meet demand. More money in circulation does not increase prices until it starts bumping into production capacity limits.
- SolarNet 9y ago
  The system has more authoritative nodes. Validators require external information like government IDs. You obviously didn't even read it.
  - nerdponx 9y ago
    I skimmed it. I missed that point. That does address the concern, though. Thank you for pointing it out.
- PeterisP 9y ago
  The system as described does create real income in those coins - the newly printed money goes to everyone equally, but the inflation affects those who hold existing money. In this manner, it's an ongoing redistribution of the coins (assuming they stay fungible) from those who have them to everyone else.
nwah1 9y ago
Producers of most goods will not be able to raise prices, but providers of scarce goods with inelastic supply will be able to raise prices. Like land. Land has a perfectly inelastic supply, and thus expectations of more income will lead to increases in rent. Whereas, by contrast, increases in the price of food quickly lead to increases in the supply of food. As Matt Rognlie of MIT showed, rents have been responsible for almost all of the returns to the already-wealthy over the past few centuries that Piketty documented.
- jackcosgrove 9y ago
  If labor becomes scarce as a result of UBI, and producers can no longer recoup production costs at current prices, they will cease operations, reducing supply and raising prices. I think it's incorrect to think that a good has an intrinsically elastic or inelastic supply.
- Godel_unicode 9y ago
  Why on Earth do you think producers will be unable to raise prices? > Land has a perfectly inelastic supply, and thus expectations of more income will lead to increases in rent. It seems like you're talking about housing rather than land, you don't think that more construction happens when there's more demand? Most of the populated world doesn't have the unique constraints present in the Bay area or NYC.
  - nwah1 9y ago
    >Why on Earth do you think producers will be unable to raise prices? Because of the law of supply and demand, as it pertains to the outputs of a productive process in a relatively free market context. The prices will generally tend towards the costs (including opportunity costs) in the long run, and demand shocks will only cause temporary rises in price until production can catch up. With naturally scarce commodities, that is not possible, because there is no production. >you don't think that more construction happens when there's more demand? Land supply is perfectly inelastic. Improvements on land are somewhat elastic, although ultimately anchored by lots of factors... and the speculative holding of land is a big one. Furthermore, there's an upper limit to the amount of density that a region can sustain and still be livable. There's a "standard of comfort" that people have, which ultimately determines a lot of it, though. So, in theory, if we became more comfortable at higher densities, we could live like people in Hong Kong. Yet, that doesn't mean even they can sustain infinite density, and indeed they have high rents in Hong Kong.
smokeyj 9y ago
The theory seems to be that when people have a safety net they'll better themselves with long term skills and grow the economy. I'm more inclined to have a more concrete social contract. For example, pay someone to learn a trade, and as long as they hit their requirements - they can live all expenses paid for. For the cost of a college education we could give people a valuable trade and a small business loan. I think the reality is we have a cultural stigma against physical labor and hard work. Some of us aren't against the idea of "free money", but I want a guarantee it's being used for good.
- pjc50 9y ago
  This is basically the intent of the existing means-tested systems. While they've got us this far, we can also see all the people who fall between the cracks; recently this was covered by people getting on disability benefits of one sort or another, but the constant pressure of " is this person deserving" erodes that.
  - smokeyj 9y ago
    If UBI is sustainable and grows the economy, is there a reason not to implement it at a more local level than federal?
    - madeofpalk 9y ago
      In many other nations UBI would constitutionally be a federal concern. And then there's also the whole 'universal' part.
      - smokeyj 9y ago
        I thought it was "universal" because it was meant to replace all social welfare programs with a basic income.. But what about it requires to be at the federal level? Is there a base number of participants that are required? Does that mean smaller governments can't have UBI? Or, is the idea just so big we can't be bothered to get into the technicalities of it all?
madeofpalk 9y ago
At first I was about to jump in with the standard "most people won't end up with an increase in income due to UBI being counteracted at tax time". Then you said > UBI could lead to stagflation because the income allotments and any increases would be according to some formula known ahead of time. This means that producers could anticipate demand and simply raise prices to soak up any income increases. This is a very interesting point that I have never considered before. Thanks for mentioning it.
- SubiculumCode 9y ago
  Apparently they don't think that competition in the market will keep prices as low as possible. Increases in circulating money supply do not automatically turn into inflation/increased prices. Relative to the money supply, when producers can meet the increase in demand, there will be little inflation. I'd argue we have an excess in global production capacity that can quickly be mobilized to accommodate a large increase in demand, thus leaving inflation modest.
  - gnarbarian 9y ago
    It also hugely depends on the competitiveness of the market in question. Corn is not likely to go up in price but your internet bill probably will.
    - SubiculumCode 9y ago
      Indeed. One of the issues with the modern economy is LACK of competition. There is significant declines in competitiveness across industries (e.g., https://www3.nd.edu/~wbrooks/BKL_merged.pdf https://www3.nd.edu/~wbrooks/BKL_merged.pdf). For UBI to not result in increased prices, and to be effective, we must also solve issues related to monopolization and price fixing of markets.
jayd16 9y ago
Is this only an issue if you print money to pay for the UBI? If UBI is payed for by taxes then it shouldn't devalue the currency. So this is an issue for a coin but not necessarily UBI, no?
- Suncho 9y ago
  > Is this only an issue if you print money to pay for the UBI? If UBI is payed for by taxes then it shouldn't devalue the currency. The amount of money the government can spend without causing inflation has very little to do with the level of tax revenues they collect. One way to think about it is that the economy has a certain amount of spending that it can productively respond to. Beyond that level of spending, you start running into problems such as inflation, interest rates that are too high, etc. It doesn't matter whether you took any money from the rich to fund that spending because the rich people weren't going to spend very much of their money into the productive economy anyway. The productive economy can still absorb the same amount of spending as before. But you're right that there does have to be some kind of mechanism to keep the currency stable and I don't see such a mechanism in Circles.
dghughes 9y ago
I remember my mom telling me how food prices took a big jump in the early 1970s, I wonder if that's what happened.
SubiculumCode 9y ago
The inflation was due to lack of supply of oil. How does that translate to UBI and companies increasing prices?
skybrian 9y ago
Since the 1980's, the Fed has been very willing to raise interest rates to fight core inflation. Businesses now expect that. So it seems like inflation worries based on what happened in the 70's are overblown. The Fed doesn't target housing prices. But a basic income (not tied to a job) should make it more affordable to move away from high-demand areas, reducing demand somewhat.
runeks 9y ago
> What was happening was that since wage increases came to be anticipated due to the consistent low interest rate/moderate to high inflation environment, producers would preemptively raise prices to soak up all of the wage gains. > Eventually stagflation was ended by dramatically raising interest rates and triggering a nasty recession. An alternative explanation is that, since interest rates were lower than the rate of inflation, producers issued bonds to finance stock (raw commodities and semi-finished goods), which pushed up both the inflation rate and bond interest rates. While the rate of inflation was higher than the bond interest rate, the incentive remained for producers to issue bonds and use the proceeds to hoard stock. In combination with this, the increasing demand for consumer goods — because of rising inflation — caused the yield on retail shelf space to increase. I.e. if people empty a shelf of flour twice as fast, because they want to stock up before prices increase, the yield on the capital that is retail shelf space doubles. This meant the Fed lost control over the short term deposit rate, since money market funds were able to overbid the Fed by financing the inventory of retail stores. Thus, the Fed lost control over the short term rate of interest, which kept increasing along with the rate of inflation.
conanbatt 9y ago
Producers have as much control of the price of the goods they sell as the consumers. That is little at all. Also I have never accepted the simple case that UBI will cause inflation. Its almost a ridiculous proposition to me.
Suncho 9y ago
> UBI proponents should be cognizant of stagflation. Everyone should be. =) > In reality the Phillips curve was too simple. Yes. The Phillips curve relationship between inflation and unemployment only holds under certain conditions. Policymakers thought they could stimulate the economy by causing inflation, but this kind of thing isn't going to work if the underlying problem with your economy is that you have less access to resources (in this case, oil). So the policymakers made a mistake in the 1970's. And, as you say, the expectations of inflation led to institutional inflation, which is basically just inflation that reinforces itself out of habit. Small amounts of inflation can be okay because they help the economy more evenly absorb adverse conditions. For example, instead of firing a bunch of your workers, inflation allows you instead to choose not to give people raises. But there's a limit to how much benefit you can get out of inflation. > UBI could lead to stagflation because the income allotments and any increases would be according to some formula known ahead of time. This means that producers could anticipate demand and simply raise prices to soak up any income increases. Hmm. I'm not sure this is right. UBI or not, you need to keep inflation in check. But there's a lot more to inflation than just the amount of money in circulation. In order to keep prices stable, the amount of spending in the economy must stay aligned with the amount of actual stuff being traded. Generally speaking, monetary policy keeps prices stable. If there otherwise would be deflation, monetary policy incentivizes borrowing (lowers interest rates) to increase the amount of spending in the economy. If there would otherwise be inflation, monetary policy disincentivizes borrowing (raises interest rates). UBI, on its own, won't cause inflation, let alone stagflation. In fact, it can lessen the need for monetary policy to encourage borrowing in the private economy. Through the monetary policy response it induces, basic income can take some of the fuel away from the speculative bubbles that tend to destabilize the economy every so often. However, Circles hasn't described how they plan to implement monetary policy. Without solving the problem of price stability, they won't have much of a currency, let alone a basic income. A flat increase in the amount of the basic income isn't going to cut it. Monetary policy must be able to respond to various economic conditions. It's probably a mistake not to keep your monetary policy separate from your basic income.

nerdponx 9y ago

This was my first thought. If you print money on a fixed schedule, the natural market response is to devalue the currency according to the same fixed schedule. Nobody gets any real income; they get a fixed lifetime endowment of buying power, granted in predictable intervals, and the only thing that changes over time is the denomination of the currency. Interesting idea: "universal basic lifetime income", UBLI. But perhaps not what the author was going for. It's been a while since I've done serious economic analysis. Please correct me if I'm wrong. --- edit --- Also, the whole thing is predicated on a web of trust to prevent Sybil attacks. Fine, but PGP has shown pretty conclusively that a web of trust like this is a failed model. A single trust authority makes far more sense for this application. In the PGP case, casual users like myself don't personally know anybody who uses PGP. I would have to go out of my way to acquire a reasonable degree of trust on my key: I'd basically have to start asking people I hardly know "hey can you sign my key?" which I'd rather not do. That's fine, because PGP is for hacker nerds and not everybody needs or wants to be a hacker nerd. The problem, however, is that if this is to be truly universal then you need to guarantee universal access. What if I've been in prison for 5 years, I can't get in contact with any of my family, and my old private key is long lost. So I start up a new account and... what? Who trusts me? I basically have to start asking random people to trust me. So people have to trust each other. Then what's stopping a con artist from going from town to town, getting store owners and locals with bleeding hearts to trust each of his multiple duplicate currencies. The Sybil attack can proceed with trivial social engineering. You're in a Catch-22: either people are skeptical, and the system is decidedly non-inclusive, or people are trusting, and the system is insecure. You need centralized trust: it's the same problem we have today with domain names. You need an authoritative list of valid domains, and a single source of truth for accessing that list. The nice thing about a trust authority is that it doesn't need to be physically centralized. Just record everyone's citizenship on a blockchain like Ethereum. But at this point I'm just speculating.

jackcosgrove 9y ago
I am not an economist, and am summarizing the received wisdom on stagflation and tentatively applying it to UBI. If I could put my economist hat on, I would think that the real value of UBI allotments would be constant, as you said, in the best case.
akvadrako 9y ago
PGP didn't show that the web of trust is a failed model. PGP sucks from a UI perspective, so it would have failed even if it was centralised. Which it basically is with MIT's keyserver.
jchrisa 9y ago
My solution to this is to embed key signing in everyday face-to-face activities. If your wallet gets signed every time you buy something, soon it will have useful identity. https://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/ https://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/
SubiculumCode 9y ago
Not an economist, but wouldn't competition keep prices lower? Also, inflation happens when supply cannot meet demand. More money in circulation does not increase prices until it starts bumping into production capacity limits.
SolarNet 9y ago
The system has more authoritative nodes. Validators require external information like government IDs. You obviously didn't even read it.
- nerdponx 9y ago
  I skimmed it. I missed that point. That does address the concern, though. Thank you for pointing it out.
PeterisP 9y ago
The system as described does create real income in those coins - the newly printed money goes to everyone equally, but the inflation affects those who hold existing money. In this manner, it's an ongoing redistribution of the coins (assuming they stay fungible) from those who have them to everyone else.

nwah1 9y ago

Producers of most goods will not be able to raise prices, but providers of scarce goods with inelastic supply will be able to raise prices. Like land. Land has a perfectly inelastic supply, and thus expectations of more income will lead to increases in rent. Whereas, by contrast, increases in the price of food quickly lead to increases in the supply of food. As Matt Rognlie of MIT showed, rents have been responsible for almost all of the returns to the already-wealthy over the past few centuries that Piketty documented.

jackcosgrove 9y ago
If labor becomes scarce as a result of UBI, and producers can no longer recoup production costs at current prices, they will cease operations, reducing supply and raising prices. I think it's incorrect to think that a good has an intrinsically elastic or inelastic supply.
Godel_unicode 9y ago
Why on Earth do you think producers will be unable to raise prices? > Land has a perfectly inelastic supply, and thus expectations of more income will lead to increases in rent. It seems like you're talking about housing rather than land, you don't think that more construction happens when there's more demand? Most of the populated world doesn't have the unique constraints present in the Bay area or NYC.
- nwah1 9y ago
  >Why on Earth do you think producers will be unable to raise prices? Because of the law of supply and demand, as it pertains to the outputs of a productive process in a relatively free market context. The prices will generally tend towards the costs (including opportunity costs) in the long run, and demand shocks will only cause temporary rises in price until production can catch up. With naturally scarce commodities, that is not possible, because there is no production. >you don't think that more construction happens when there's more demand? Land supply is perfectly inelastic. Improvements on land are somewhat elastic, although ultimately anchored by lots of factors... and the speculative holding of land is a big one. Furthermore, there's an upper limit to the amount of density that a region can sustain and still be livable. There's a "standard of comfort" that people have, which ultimately determines a lot of it, though. So, in theory, if we became more comfortable at higher densities, we could live like people in Hong Kong. Yet, that doesn't mean even they can sustain infinite density, and indeed they have high rents in Hong Kong.

smokeyj 9y ago

The theory seems to be that when people have a safety net they'll better themselves with long term skills and grow the economy. I'm more inclined to have a more concrete social contract. For example, pay someone to learn a trade, and as long as they hit their requirements - they can live all expenses paid for. For the cost of a college education we could give people a valuable trade and a small business loan. I think the reality is we have a cultural stigma against physical labor and hard work. Some of us aren't against the idea of "free money", but I want a guarantee it's being used for good.

pjc50 9y ago
This is basically the intent of the existing means-tested systems. While they've got us this far, we can also see all the people who fall between the cracks; recently this was covered by people getting on disability benefits of one sort or another, but the constant pressure of " is this person deserving" erodes that.
- smokeyj 9y ago
  If UBI is sustainable and grows the economy, is there a reason not to implement it at a more local level than federal?
  - madeofpalk 9y ago
    In many other nations UBI would constitutionally be a federal concern. And then there's also the whole 'universal' part.
    - smokeyj 9y ago
      I thought it was "universal" because it was meant to replace all social welfare programs with a basic income.. But what about it requires to be at the federal level? Is there a base number of participants that are required? Does that mean smaller governments can't have UBI? Or, is the idea just so big we can't be bothered to get into the technicalities of it all?

madeofpalk 9y ago

At first I was about to jump in with the standard "most people won't end up with an increase in income due to UBI being counteracted at tax time". Then you said > UBI could lead to stagflation because the income allotments and any increases would be according to some formula known ahead of time. This means that producers could anticipate demand and simply raise prices to soak up any income increases. This is a very interesting point that I have never considered before. Thanks for mentioning it.

SubiculumCode 9y ago
Apparently they don't think that competition in the market will keep prices as low as possible. Increases in circulating money supply do not automatically turn into inflation/increased prices. Relative to the money supply, when producers can meet the increase in demand, there will be little inflation. I'd argue we have an excess in global production capacity that can quickly be mobilized to accommodate a large increase in demand, thus leaving inflation modest.
- gnarbarian 9y ago
  It also hugely depends on the competitiveness of the market in question. Corn is not likely to go up in price but your internet bill probably will.
  - SubiculumCode 9y ago
    Indeed. One of the issues with the modern economy is LACK of competition. There is significant declines in competitiveness across industries (e.g., https://www3.nd.edu/~wbrooks/BKL_merged.pdf https://www3.nd.edu/~wbrooks/BKL_merged.pdf). For UBI to not result in increased prices, and to be effective, we must also solve issues related to monopolization and price fixing of markets.

jayd16 9y ago

Is this only an issue if you print money to pay for the UBI? If UBI is payed for by taxes then it shouldn't devalue the currency. So this is an issue for a coin but not necessarily UBI, no?

Suncho 9y ago
> Is this only an issue if you print money to pay for the UBI? If UBI is payed for by taxes then it shouldn't devalue the currency. The amount of money the government can spend without causing inflation has very little to do with the level of tax revenues they collect. One way to think about it is that the economy has a certain amount of spending that it can productively respond to. Beyond that level of spending, you start running into problems such as inflation, interest rates that are too high, etc. It doesn't matter whether you took any money from the rich to fund that spending because the rich people weren't going to spend very much of their money into the productive economy anyway. The productive economy can still absorb the same amount of spending as before. But you're right that there does have to be some kind of mechanism to keep the currency stable and I don't see such a mechanism in Circles.

dghughes 9y ago

I remember my mom telling me how food prices took a big jump in the early 1970s, I wonder if that's what happened.

SubiculumCode 9y ago

The inflation was due to lack of supply of oil. How does that translate to UBI and companies increasing prices?

skybrian 9y ago

Since the 1980's, the Fed has been very willing to raise interest rates to fight core inflation. Businesses now expect that. So it seems like inflation worries based on what happened in the 70's are overblown. The Fed doesn't target housing prices. But a basic income (not tied to a job) should make it more affordable to move away from high-demand areas, reducing demand somewhat.

runeks 9y ago

> What was happening was that since wage increases came to be anticipated due to the consistent low interest rate/moderate to high inflation environment, producers would preemptively raise prices to soak up all of the wage gains. > Eventually stagflation was ended by dramatically raising interest rates and triggering a nasty recession. An alternative explanation is that, since interest rates were lower than the rate of inflation, producers issued bonds to finance stock (raw commodities and semi-finished goods), which pushed up both the inflation rate and bond interest rates. While the rate of inflation was higher than the bond interest rate, the incentive remained for producers to issue bonds and use the proceeds to hoard stock. In combination with this, the increasing demand for consumer goods — because of rising inflation — caused the yield on retail shelf space to increase. I.e. if people empty a shelf of flour twice as fast, because they want to stock up before prices increase, the yield on the capital that is retail shelf space doubles. This meant the Fed lost control over the short term deposit rate, since money market funds were able to overbid the Fed by financing the inventory of retail stores. Thus, the Fed lost control over the short term rate of interest, which kept increasing along with the rate of inflation.

conanbatt 9y ago

Producers have as much control of the price of the goods they sell as the consumers. That is little at all. Also I have never accepted the simple case that UBI will cause inflation. Its almost a ridiculous proposition to me.

Suncho 9y ago

> UBI proponents should be cognizant of stagflation. Everyone should be. =) > In reality the Phillips curve was too simple. Yes. The Phillips curve relationship between inflation and unemployment only holds under certain conditions. Policymakers thought they could stimulate the economy by causing inflation, but this kind of thing isn't going to work if the underlying problem with your economy is that you have less access to resources (in this case, oil). So the policymakers made a mistake in the 1970's. And, as you say, the expectations of inflation led to institutional inflation, which is basically just inflation that reinforces itself out of habit. Small amounts of inflation can be okay because they help the economy more evenly absorb adverse conditions. For example, instead of firing a bunch of your workers, inflation allows you instead to choose not to give people raises. But there's a limit to how much benefit you can get out of inflation. > UBI could lead to stagflation because the income allotments and any increases would be according to some formula known ahead of time. This means that producers could anticipate demand and simply raise prices to soak up any income increases. Hmm. I'm not sure this is right. UBI or not, you need to keep inflation in check. But there's a lot more to inflation than just the amount of money in circulation. In order to keep prices stable, the amount of spending in the economy must stay aligned with the amount of actual stuff being traded. Generally speaking, monetary policy keeps prices stable. If there otherwise would be deflation, monetary policy incentivizes borrowing (lowers interest rates) to increase the amount of spending in the economy. If there would otherwise be inflation, monetary policy disincentivizes borrowing (raises interest rates). UBI, on its own, won't cause inflation, let alone stagflation. In fact, it can lessen the need for monetary policy to encourage borrowing in the private economy. Through the monetary policy response it induces, basic income can take some of the fuel away from the speculative bubbles that tend to destabilize the economy every so often. However, Circles hasn't described how they plan to implement monetary policy. Without solving the problem of price stability, they won't have much of a currency, let alone a basic income. A flat increase in the amount of the basic income isn't going to cut it. Monetary policy must be able to respond to various economic conditions. It's probably a mistake not to keep your monetary policy separate from your basic income.