4 ms·
If anyone has doubts about UBI, consider the great A/B (or rather B/W?) experiment the government ran as part of the New Deal. One group was provided subsidies
by not_that_noob 8y ago
If anyone has doubts about UBI, consider the great A/B (or rather B/W?) experiment the government ran as part of the New Deal. One group was provided subsidies for housing (analogous to UBI) and another was not - decades later, the initial modest help compounded to leave one group much more prosperous than the other. I'm willing to bet on the outcome of this study.
https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history...
"African-American families that were prohibited from buying homes in the suburbs in the 1940s and '50s and even into the '60s, by the Federal Housing Administration, gained none of the equity appreciation that whites gained. So ... the Daly City development south of San Francisco or Levittown or any of the others in between across the country, those homes in the late 1940s and 1950s sold for about twice national median income. They were affordable to working-class families with an FHA or VA mortgage. African-Americans were equally able to afford those homes as whites but were prohibited from buying them. Today those homes sell for $300,000 [or] $400,000 at the minimum, six, eight times national median income. ..."
- tzahola 8y agoSubsidized housing is not UBI. Welfare is not UBI. EBT cards are not UBI. Also, these guys were just lucky that the government subsidized their homes in SF which experienced a tech boom 50 years later. Now imagine the same in Detroit.
- smsm42 8y agoWhat you describe in not UBI, it's discrimination. I think it's pretty clear that if you exclude certain group from preferable markets, and sideline them to be able to buy only second-rate and third-rate goods, then you'll find plenty of examples where they end up at a huge disadvantage. It's not a test of UBI, it's a test of whether restricting access to a market can hurt a group against which it is used. I think we can all agree that the answer to this question is a definite "yes" - but it has no connection with UBI.