7 ms·

> 0. People are primarily self serving and will likely not use the money as proponents intent This is an assumption, rooted in the belief that people are poor

by nkoren 8y ago

> 0. People are primarily self serving and will likely not use the money as proponents intent This is an assumption, rooted in the belief that people are poor because they are lazy, and it is wrong. There are numerous studies which disprove this assumption and I have yet to see a study which supports it. > 1. If you give everyone a basic monthly income, what’s stopping everyone else who provides services (i.e. housing) from just increasing prices by however much the income is, thus negating the free money in the first place. While a UBI would raise the median income within an economy, if it was funded out of income tax then it would be neutral with respect to the mean available income, which is more what prices respond to. > What would make more sense are price controls to bring down costs, like housing and utilities. That's a really terrible idea. Free-market competition is better. Public ownership and provision of services is also better. Price controls on private markets, however, is genuinely the the worst of all worlds. It also does nothing whatsoever to help people at the bottom of the economic ladder, who don't have access to money at all.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
joe_the_user 8y ago
While a UBI would raise the median income within an economy, if it was funded out of income tax then it would be neutral with respect to the mean available income, which is more what prices respond to. This seems like an argument that breaks when one looks at the details of the markets involved. A landlord who owns low-income units doesn't care about average income. The landlord knows the income of their tenants and knows that they suddenly are able to afford more rent and so that landlord raises the rent to be able to take part in the windfall. IE, your argument would only work is housing units has efficient, elastic supply and demand like candy or something, where rising income taxes for the wealthy would reduce their demand for low-income units in the central cites. But we know the wealthy's demand for such units already near zero and the demand of the poor for such units is going to be constant.
- dx87 8y ago
  A prime example of what you're talking about is apartments around military bases; landlords know that everyone on the base has to stay in the area for at least a few years, so they did sketchy stuff with what they'd charge for rent because they knew that the person couldn't leave. The pay rate of different ranks is public information, so if landlords found out you got promoted, they would raise your rent by difference between your old pay rate and new pay rate. Eventually the govt had to step in and make it illegal to charge different rent amounts based on what the service members rank was.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > This seems like an argument that breaks when one looks at the details of the markets involved. A landlord who owns low-income units doesn't care about average income. A compression of income distribution (raising the floor/median without changing mean) means that low-income residents are more likely able to afford to rent units at a tier higher if the price for value not of low-income apartments gets worse (now, if this happens a lot in practice, it drives up prices at the next tier, but the fact that it can itself is a constraint on price increases in the bottom tier.) And this can be interated at each level until you reach the tiers with net payers, and realize that, yes, their decline in demand,even though it isn't directly the same units as the lowest tier, has enough effect on the lowest tier, through a chain of incone tiers with overlapping markets, even though the top tier doesn't overlap with the bottom.
  - dllthomas 8y ago
    Additionally, we still have competition of similar units owned by other landlords, as well as competition of alternatives that are not similar at all (like moving out of the area or taking on additional roommates) that can nonetheless reduce the quantity of housing demanded in an area at a higher price.
  - joe_the_user 8y ago
    A compression of income distribution (raising the floor/median without changing mean) means that low-income residents are more likely able to afford to rent units at a tier higher if the price for value not of low-income apartments gets worse. Unless each tier goes up in value by an amount proportionate to what landlords expect the wind-fall to be. The effect of increased rent isn't just going to be at the lowest income but will happen as each landlord acts accordingly. Landlord don't have to play by some fair rules of economics or something. Instead they optimize their income in the obvious fashion. Rents would rise in unit up to the level where taxes begin reduce total incomes (those would be mostly home and condo owners at that point I assume).
tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
You don't have to assume that poor people are lazy in order to be worried about how the money will be spent. It takes an equally shaky assumption in order to believe that the money will be spent as intended. I'd have to see a wealth of evidence to convince me of that.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > You don't have to assume that poor people are lazy in order to be worried about how the money will be spent. It takes an equally shaky assumption in order to believe that the money will be spent as intended. The intent of most UBI supporters is that money be spent according to the perceived needs of the recipients. Centralized control of use is an explicit non-goal. In fact, one big argument of UBI supporters is that aid recieved even in restricted form will often be redirected in that manner with overhead for the mechanisms of repurposing the benedits, in any case, such that attempts to control how aid is spent are often just expending extra public resources in administrative functions with the net effect of reducing the value of benefits without controlling their use.
- Frondo 8y ago
  "as intended" -- intended by whom, and for what purpose? It's their money, not yours, not mine, and they can do whatever they please with it. Let people be people, the world has more than enough to take care of everyone even when they're doing whatever they want.
umvi 8y ago
> This is an assumption, rooted in the belief that people are poor because they are lazy, and it is wrong I would have phrased it differently, namely that people at the bottom of the economic ladder lack the education to wisely spend UBI and it will end up getting wasted or siphoned by predators. I've worked closely with poor people in my church, helping them learn to budget and such, and what I've found is that more often than not, they had hundreds of dollars each month tied up in services they didn't use, many of them very deceptive and predatory (i.e. the letter has red ink "amount due" stamped on it, even though it wasn't even a bill!)
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  So let's start providing that education. Provide it as part of these programs, and start teaching basic finance in high school.
  - umvi 8y ago
    I agree, but that's actually quite difficult. In many poor areas, high school attendance is low and truancy is high. Teachers are underpaid, not allowed to discipline students, and a host of other problems that make "providing education" not as simple as it sounds.
- Simulacra 8y ago
  My coworker tells me that if he received a UBI each month he would blow it on hookers and drugs.
baq 8y ago
> Free-market competition is better. one problem with this is that 1) free market with no regulation leads to monopoly when only one competitor remains and 2) efficient markets are purely theoretical due to impossibility of having perfect information in the real world.
- nkoren 8y ago
  Oh I agree with this entirely. Market competition can be fantastic, but is only really possible in domains where consumers are A.) able to make choices (eg., not fire or ambulance or life-saving medical services), based on B.) sufficiently good-enough information (doesn't need to be perfect, just good-enough), where the suppliers are C.) sufficiently well-regulated so as to prevent the formation of monopolies or cartels. This isn't theoretical; it can and does happen -- just not for every type of good or service, and rarely by accident. A well-functioning market has to be designed. Analogy: the freest roads of all would have no lane markings or regulations. This would give you "freedom from" regulation, but wouldn't give you the "freedom to" do very much. Roads with rules and regulations aren't "un-free"; they just prioritize "freedom to" over "freedom from". And in some places, of course, mass transit just works better. Markets, too, aren't for everything. But when government is going to intervene to control prices, without actually taking any responsibility for the provision of said goods and services themselves, then those price controls quickly become divorced from reality, and do little besides create deadweight losses in some places and black markets in the rest. That's a lose-lose proposition.
- Simulacra 8y ago
  i.e. Comcast.
s73v3r_ 8y ago
"Free-market competition is better." Free market competition is better for some things, not everything. It's terrible, for instance, for medical services, as one usually doesn't have much opportunity to shop around when there's an emergency.
- aetherson 8y ago
  Only a small proportion of medical services are used in hours-matter-emergencies.

by nkoren 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

joe_the_user 8y ago

While a UBI would raise the median income within an economy, if it was funded out of income tax then it would be neutral with respect to the mean available income, which is more what prices respond to. This seems like an argument that breaks when one looks at the details of the markets involved. A landlord who owns low-income units doesn't care about average income. The landlord knows the income of their tenants and knows that they suddenly are able to afford more rent and so that landlord raises the rent to be able to take part in the windfall. IE, your argument would only work is housing units has efficient, elastic supply and demand like candy or something, where rising income taxes for the wealthy would reduce their demand for low-income units in the central cites. But we know the wealthy's demand for such units already near zero and the demand of the poor for such units is going to be constant.

dx87 8y ago
A prime example of what you're talking about is apartments around military bases; landlords know that everyone on the base has to stay in the area for at least a few years, so they did sketchy stuff with what they'd charge for rent because they knew that the person couldn't leave. The pay rate of different ranks is public information, so if landlords found out you got promoted, they would raise your rent by difference between your old pay rate and new pay rate. Eventually the govt had to step in and make it illegal to charge different rent amounts based on what the service members rank was.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> This seems like an argument that breaks when one looks at the details of the markets involved. A landlord who owns low-income units doesn't care about average income. A compression of income distribution (raising the floor/median without changing mean) means that low-income residents are more likely able to afford to rent units at a tier higher if the price for value not of low-income apartments gets worse (now, if this happens a lot in practice, it drives up prices at the next tier, but the fact that it can itself is a constraint on price increases in the bottom tier.) And this can be interated at each level until you reach the tiers with net payers, and realize that, yes, their decline in demand,even though it isn't directly the same units as the lowest tier, has enough effect on the lowest tier, through a chain of incone tiers with overlapping markets, even though the top tier doesn't overlap with the bottom.
- dllthomas 8y ago
  Additionally, we still have competition of similar units owned by other landlords, as well as competition of alternatives that are not similar at all (like moving out of the area or taking on additional roommates) that can nonetheless reduce the quantity of housing demanded in an area at a higher price.
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  A compression of income distribution (raising the floor/median without changing mean) means that low-income residents are more likely able to afford to rent units at a tier higher if the price for value not of low-income apartments gets worse. Unless each tier goes up in value by an amount proportionate to what landlords expect the wind-fall to be. The effect of increased rent isn't just going to be at the lowest income but will happen as each landlord acts accordingly. Landlord don't have to play by some fair rules of economics or something. Instead they optimize their income in the obvious fashion. Rents would rise in unit up to the level where taxes begin reduce total incomes (those would be mostly home and condo owners at that point I assume).

tenaciousDaniel 8y ago

You don't have to assume that poor people are lazy in order to be worried about how the money will be spent. It takes an equally shaky assumption in order to believe that the money will be spent as intended. I'd have to see a wealth of evidence to convince me of that.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> You don't have to assume that poor people are lazy in order to be worried about how the money will be spent. It takes an equally shaky assumption in order to believe that the money will be spent as intended. The intent of most UBI supporters is that money be spent according to the perceived needs of the recipients. Centralized control of use is an explicit non-goal. In fact, one big argument of UBI supporters is that aid recieved even in restricted form will often be redirected in that manner with overhead for the mechanisms of repurposing the benedits, in any case, such that attempts to control how aid is spent are often just expending extra public resources in administrative functions with the net effect of reducing the value of benefits without controlling their use.
Frondo 8y ago
"as intended" -- intended by whom, and for what purpose? It's their money, not yours, not mine, and they can do whatever they please with it. Let people be people, the world has more than enough to take care of everyone even when they're doing whatever they want.

umvi 8y ago

> This is an assumption, rooted in the belief that people are poor because they are lazy, and it is wrong I would have phrased it differently, namely that people at the bottom of the economic ladder lack the education to wisely spend UBI and it will end up getting wasted or siphoned by predators. I've worked closely with poor people in my church, helping them learn to budget and such, and what I've found is that more often than not, they had hundreds of dollars each month tied up in services they didn't use, many of them very deceptive and predatory (i.e. the letter has red ink "amount due" stamped on it, even though it wasn't even a bill!)

s73v3r_ 8y ago
So let's start providing that education. Provide it as part of these programs, and start teaching basic finance in high school.
- umvi 8y ago
  I agree, but that's actually quite difficult. In many poor areas, high school attendance is low and truancy is high. Teachers are underpaid, not allowed to discipline students, and a host of other problems that make "providing education" not as simple as it sounds.
Simulacra 8y ago
My coworker tells me that if he received a UBI each month he would blow it on hookers and drugs.

baq 8y ago

> Free-market competition is better. one problem with this is that 1) free market with no regulation leads to monopoly when only one competitor remains and 2) efficient markets are purely theoretical due to impossibility of having perfect information in the real world.

nkoren 8y ago
Oh I agree with this entirely. Market competition can be fantastic, but is only really possible in domains where consumers are A.) able to make choices (eg., not fire or ambulance or life-saving medical services), based on B.) sufficiently good-enough information (doesn't need to be perfect, just good-enough), where the suppliers are C.) sufficiently well-regulated so as to prevent the formation of monopolies or cartels. This isn't theoretical; it can and does happen -- just not for every type of good or service, and rarely by accident. A well-functioning market has to be designed. Analogy: the freest roads of all would have no lane markings or regulations. This would give you "freedom from" regulation, but wouldn't give you the "freedom to" do very much. Roads with rules and regulations aren't "un-free"; they just prioritize "freedom to" over "freedom from". And in some places, of course, mass transit just works better. Markets, too, aren't for everything. But when government is going to intervene to control prices, without actually taking any responsibility for the provision of said goods and services themselves, then those price controls quickly become divorced from reality, and do little besides create deadweight losses in some places and black markets in the rest. That's a lose-lose proposition.
Simulacra 8y ago
i.e. Comcast.

s73v3r_ 8y ago

"Free-market competition is better." Free market competition is better for some things, not everything. It's terrible, for instance, for medical services, as one usually doesn't have much opportunity to shop around when there's an emergency.

aetherson 8y ago
Only a small proportion of medical services are used in hours-matter-emergencies.