4 ms·

> I support UBI Honestly, what type of housing do you envision under a UBI system? Houses? Modern apartment buildings? College dormitory-like buildings? Soviet

> I support UBI Honestly, what type of housing do you envision under a UBI system? Houses? Modern apartment buildings? College dormitory-like buildings? Soviet-style complexes? Prison-style accommodations? B stands for basic, how basic?

ben_w 1y ago
(Not the person you're replying to) I think a UBI system is only stable in conjunction with sufficient automation that work itself becomes redundant. Before that point, I don't think UBI can genuinely be sustained; and IMO even very close to that point the best I expect we will see, if we're lucky, is the state pension age going down. (That it's going up in many places suggests that many governments do not expect this level of automation any time soon). Therefore, in all seriousness, I would anticipate a real UBI system to provide whatever housing you want, up to and including things that are currently unaffordable even to billionaires, e.g. 1:1 scale replicas of any of the ships called Enterprise including both aircraft carriers and also the fictional spaceships. That said, I am a proponent of direct state involvement in the housing market, e.g. the UK council housing system as it used to be (but not as it now is, there're not building enough): • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_the_United_K... • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_house
- listenallyall 1y ago
  I appreciate your perspective but clearly most UBI advocates are talking about something much sooner. However my response to your vision is that even if "work" is totally automated or redundant, the resources (building materials) and the energy to power the robots or whatever, will be more expensive and tightly controlled than ever. Power and wealth simply wont allow everything to be accessible to everyone. The idea that people would be able to build enormous mansions (or personal aircraft carriers or spaceships) just sounds rather absurd, no offense, but come on.
  - mcny 1y ago
    I think we are talking about two different things. The UBI I'm talking about won't allow you to have an enormous mansion, maybe just enough to avoid starving. The main plus point is it doesn't do means testing. The second plus point is if you really hate your job, you can quit without starving. This means we can avoid coworkers who really would like to not be there. I think it is a solid idea. I don't know how it fits in the broader scheme of things though. If everyone in the US gets a UBI of the same amount, will people move somewhere rent is low? From wikipedia: > a social welfare proposal in which all citizens of a given population regularly receive a minimum income in the form of an unconditional transfer payment, i.e., without a means test or need to perform work. It doesn't say you aren't allowed to work for more money. My understanding is you can still work as much as you want. You don't have to to get this payment. And you won't be penalized for making too much money.
    - ben_w 1y ago
      > I think we are talking about two different things. The UBI I'm talking about won't allow you to have an enormous mansion, maybe just enough to avoid starving. We are indeed talking about different things with UBI here, but I'm asserting that the usual model of it can't be sustained without robots doing the economic production. If the goal specifically is simply "nobody starves", the governments can absolutely organise food rations like this, food stamps exist. > If everyone in the US gets a UBI of the same amount, will people move somewhere rent is low? More likely, the rent goes up by whatever the UBI is. And I'm saying this as a landlord, I don't think it would be a good idea to create yet another system that just transfers wealth to people like me who happen to be property owners, it's already really lucrative even without that.
    - listenallyall 1y ago
      The response you're responding to here was to "ben_w", he discussed better-than-a-billionaire housing. My original reply to your earlier comment is above, basically just asking what type of housing you anticipate under a UBI system. To me, "just enough to avoid starving" is a prison-like model, just without locked doors. But multiple residents of a very basic "cell", a communal food hall, maybe a small library and modest outdoors area. But most of the time when people talk about UBI, they describe the recipients living in much nicer housing than that.
- oinfoalgo 1y ago
  The bigger issue to me is that not all geography is anything close to equal. I would much rather live on a beach front property than where I live right now. I don't because the cost trade off is too high. To bring the real estate market into equilibrium with UBI you would have to turn rural Nebraska into a giant slab city like ghetto. Or every mid sized city would have a slab city ghetto an hour outside the city. It would be ultra cheap to live there but it would be a place everyone is trying to save up to move out of. It would create a completely new under class of people.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    > I would much rather live on a beach front property than where I live right now. I don't because the cost trade off is too high. Yes, and? My reference example was two aircraft carriers and 1:1 models of some fictional spacecraft larger than some islands, as personal private residences. > To bring the real estate market into equilibrium with UBI you would have to turn rural Nebraska into a giant slab city like ghetto. Or every mid sized city would have a slab city ghetto an hour outside the city. It would be ultra cheap to live there but it would be a place everyone is trying to save up to move out of. It would create a completely new under class of people. Incorrect. Currently, about 83e6 hectares of this planet is currently a "built up area". 4827e6 ha, about 179 times the currently "built up" area, is cropland and grazing land. Such land can produce much more food than it already does, the limiting factor is the cost of labour to build e.g. irrigation and greenhouses (indeed, this would also allow production in what are currently salt flats and deserts, and enable aquaculture for a broad range of staples); as I am suggesting unbounded robot labour is already a requirement for UBI, this unlocks a great deal of land that is not currently available. The only scenario in which I believe UBI works is one where robotic labour gives us our wealth. This scenario is one in which literally everyone can get their own personal 136.4 meters side length approximately square patch. That's not per family, that's per person. Put whatever you want on it — an orchard, a decorative garden, a hobbit hole, a castle, and five Olympic-sized swimming pools if you like, because you could fit all of them together at the same time on a patch that big. The ratio (and consequently land per person), would be even bigger if I didn't disregard currently unusable land (such as mountains, deserts, glaciers, although of these three only glaciers would still be unusable in the scenario), and also if I didn't disregard land which is currently simply unused but still quite habitable e.g. forests (4000e6 ha) and scrub (1400e6 ha). In the absence of future tech, we get what we saw in the UK with "council housing", but even this is still not as you say. While it gets us cheap mediocre tower blocks, it also gets us semi-detached houses with their own gardens, and even the most mediocre of the widely disliked Brutalist architecture era of the UK this policy didn't create a new underclass, it provided homes for the existing underclass. Finally, even at the low end they largely (but not universally) were an improvement on what came before them, and this era came to an end with a government policy to sell those exact same homes cheaply to their existing occupants.

ben_w 1y ago

(Not the person you're replying to) I think a UBI system is only stable in conjunction with sufficient automation that work itself becomes redundant. Before that point, I don't think UBI can genuinely be sustained; and IMO even very close to that point the best I expect we will see, if we're lucky, is the state pension age going down. (That it's going up in many places suggests that many governments do not expect this level of automation any time soon). Therefore, in all seriousness, I would anticipate a real UBI system to provide whatever housing you want, up to and including things that are currently unaffordable even to billionaires, e.g. 1:1 scale replicas of any of the ships called Enterprise including both aircraft carriers and also the fictional spaceships. That said, I am a proponent of direct state involvement in the housing market, e.g. the UK council housing system as it used to be (but not as it now is, there're not building enough): • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_the_United_K... • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_house

listenallyall 1y ago
I appreciate your perspective but clearly most UBI advocates are talking about something much sooner. However my response to your vision is that even if "work" is totally automated or redundant, the resources (building materials) and the energy to power the robots or whatever, will be more expensive and tightly controlled than ever. Power and wealth simply wont allow everything to be accessible to everyone. The idea that people would be able to build enormous mansions (or personal aircraft carriers or spaceships) just sounds rather absurd, no offense, but come on.
- mcny 1y ago
  I think we are talking about two different things. The UBI I'm talking about won't allow you to have an enormous mansion, maybe just enough to avoid starving. The main plus point is it doesn't do means testing. The second plus point is if you really hate your job, you can quit without starving. This means we can avoid coworkers who really would like to not be there. I think it is a solid idea. I don't know how it fits in the broader scheme of things though. If everyone in the US gets a UBI of the same amount, will people move somewhere rent is low? From wikipedia: > a social welfare proposal in which all citizens of a given population regularly receive a minimum income in the form of an unconditional transfer payment, i.e., without a means test or need to perform work. It doesn't say you aren't allowed to work for more money. My understanding is you can still work as much as you want. You don't have to to get this payment. And you won't be penalized for making too much money.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    > I think we are talking about two different things. The UBI I'm talking about won't allow you to have an enormous mansion, maybe just enough to avoid starving. We are indeed talking about different things with UBI here, but I'm asserting that the usual model of it can't be sustained without robots doing the economic production. If the goal specifically is simply "nobody starves", the governments can absolutely organise food rations like this, food stamps exist. > If everyone in the US gets a UBI of the same amount, will people move somewhere rent is low? More likely, the rent goes up by whatever the UBI is. And I'm saying this as a landlord, I don't think it would be a good idea to create yet another system that just transfers wealth to people like me who happen to be property owners, it's already really lucrative even without that.
  - listenallyall 1y ago
    The response you're responding to here was to "ben_w", he discussed better-than-a-billionaire housing. My original reply to your earlier comment is above, basically just asking what type of housing you anticipate under a UBI system. To me, "just enough to avoid starving" is a prison-like model, just without locked doors. But multiple residents of a very basic "cell", a communal food hall, maybe a small library and modest outdoors area. But most of the time when people talk about UBI, they describe the recipients living in much nicer housing than that.
oinfoalgo 1y ago
The bigger issue to me is that not all geography is anything close to equal. I would much rather live on a beach front property than where I live right now. I don't because the cost trade off is too high. To bring the real estate market into equilibrium with UBI you would have to turn rural Nebraska into a giant slab city like ghetto. Or every mid sized city would have a slab city ghetto an hour outside the city. It would be ultra cheap to live there but it would be a place everyone is trying to save up to move out of. It would create a completely new under class of people.
- ben_w 1y ago
  > I would much rather live on a beach front property than where I live right now. I don't because the cost trade off is too high. Yes, and? My reference example was two aircraft carriers and 1:1 models of some fictional spacecraft larger than some islands, as personal private residences. > To bring the real estate market into equilibrium with UBI you would have to turn rural Nebraska into a giant slab city like ghetto. Or every mid sized city would have a slab city ghetto an hour outside the city. It would be ultra cheap to live there but it would be a place everyone is trying to save up to move out of. It would create a completely new under class of people. Incorrect. Currently, about 83e6 hectares of this planet is currently a "built up area". 4827e6 ha, about 179 times the currently "built up" area, is cropland and grazing land. Such land can produce much more food than it already does, the limiting factor is the cost of labour to build e.g. irrigation and greenhouses (indeed, this would also allow production in what are currently salt flats and deserts, and enable aquaculture for a broad range of staples); as I am suggesting unbounded robot labour is already a requirement for UBI, this unlocks a great deal of land that is not currently available. The only scenario in which I believe UBI works is one where robotic labour gives us our wealth. This scenario is one in which literally everyone can get their own personal 136.4 meters side length approximately square patch. That's not per family, that's per person. Put whatever you want on it — an orchard, a decorative garden, a hobbit hole, a castle, and five Olympic-sized swimming pools if you like, because you could fit all of them together at the same time on a patch that big. The ratio (and consequently land per person), would be even bigger if I didn't disregard currently unusable land (such as mountains, deserts, glaciers, although of these three only glaciers would still be unusable in the scenario), and also if I didn't disregard land which is currently simply unused but still quite habitable e.g. forests (4000e6 ha) and scrub (1400e6 ha). In the absence of future tech, we get what we saw in the UK with "council housing", but even this is still not as you say. While it gets us cheap mediocre tower blocks, it also gets us semi-detached houses with their own gardens, and even the most mediocre of the widely disliked Brutalist architecture era of the UK this policy didn't create a new underclass, it provided homes for the existing underclass. Finally, even at the low end they largely (but not universally) were an improvement on what came before them, and this era came to an end with a government policy to sell those exact same homes cheaply to their existing occupants.