I remember when the first wave of stimulus checks went out and a bunch of car dealerships suddenly raised the price on their cars by $1000. UBI would be great, but if we don’t reign in the corporate-apologist economy first, every product will suddenly be more expensive so they can bleed people of that extra money.
Oh this is an awesome comment. I love talking about this part of UBI
I studied Economics in school and dived deep into UBI. Some interesting facts/research for you:
(Fun fact) The US already has UBI, just a super watered down version. It’s called EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit). It’s a Nixon brainchild and was thought they could use UBI to reduce the inefficiencies of such a big government. I.e. get one nice UBI check that covers healthcare, retirement, insurance, education, food, housing, etc. blah blah blah, and you can shut down a bunch of federal government agencies that are pretty inefficient.
The car dealership thing happened because of a variable that we often discount: information (or knowledge). The car dealership knew exactly how much money was coming out and who got it (mostly), and they knew it was a one-off not an ongoing thing. A lot of UBI macro research guesses that we’d see some small inflationary pressure at the beginning when it’s new, but then return to normal as it becomes part of every day life. And even if it does, the benefits strongly outweigh the benefits and the Fed has other tools to reign in inflation to balance the affect out.
Caveat, this knowledge is 20+ years old. I may be way off base.
Just a heads-up, you accidentally wrote “the benefits strongly outweigh the benefits” instead of (presumably) “the benefits strongly outweigh the drawbacks.”
Sweet! I sure hope the inflation wouldn’t completely invalidate the extra income, but I still have very little faith in American capitalism allowing for there to be money not immediately being funneled into the bank accounts of the 1%.
IIRC, that was one of the ways Nixon sold it. If the plebes have more money, they spend it on more consumerism bullshit . . .which is money that ends up in the hands of the 1%.
Again, this is a 20 year old college course, so my memory could be way off (and aspirational b.c. I personally like UBI).
This second point is going to be impossible to avoid when everyone knows ubi is a thing.
In my mind I see a huge displacement coming for a large number of workers who get ousted by AI. There will still be jobs, but far fewer in each discipline. Think office workers and coders etc. Once ai matures and integrates, we are going to have millions of people without jobs as companies cut 80 to 90% in each department. UBI will be necessary and everyone who sells shit will know that it exists and we are back to square one because they increase prices. It seems hard to avoid.
To be clear, I’m all for UBI. It seems like its pretty much unavoidable as productivity per worker continues to sky rocket and wages remain the same.
The issue being we’ve never seen an actual trial of UBI. It’s always some sample of the population for a known limited time. UBI as a concept doesn’t lend itself to “trials”, we won’t really know until at least a number of entire cities are indefinitely implementing UBI, and probably would be 3 or 4 years before people start actually acting like it is indefinite.
I remember when the first wave of stimulus checks went out and a bunch of car dealerships suddenly raised the price on their cars by $1000. UBI would be great, but if we don’t reign in the corporate-apologist economy first, every product will suddenly be more expensive so they can bleed people of that extra money.
Oh this is an awesome comment. I love talking about this part of UBI
I studied Economics in school and dived deep into UBI. Some interesting facts/research for you:
(Fun fact) The US already has UBI, just a super watered down version. It’s called EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit). It’s a Nixon brainchild and was thought they could use UBI to reduce the inefficiencies of such a big government. I.e. get one nice UBI check that covers healthcare, retirement, insurance, education, food, housing, etc. blah blah blah, and you can shut down a bunch of federal government agencies that are pretty inefficient.
The car dealership thing happened because of a variable that we often discount: information (or knowledge). The car dealership knew exactly how much money was coming out and who got it (mostly), and they knew it was a one-off not an ongoing thing. A lot of UBI macro research guesses that we’d see some small inflationary pressure at the beginning when it’s new, but then return to normal as it becomes part of every day life. And even if it does, the benefits strongly outweigh the benefits and the Fed has other tools to reign in inflation to balance the affect out.
Caveat, this knowledge is 20+ years old. I may be way off base.
Just a heads-up, you accidentally wrote “the benefits strongly outweigh the benefits” instead of (presumably) “the benefits strongly outweigh the drawbacks.”
That’s just how strong the benefits are. It’s cyclic!
benefits all the way down
Sweet! I sure hope the inflation wouldn’t completely invalidate the extra income, but I still have very little faith in American capitalism allowing for there to be money not immediately being funneled into the bank accounts of the 1%.
IIRC, that was one of the ways Nixon sold it. If the plebes have more money, they spend it on more consumerism bullshit . . .which is money that ends up in the hands of the 1%.
Again, this is a 20 year old college course, so my memory could be way off (and aspirational b.c. I personally like UBI).
This second point is going to be impossible to avoid when everyone knows ubi is a thing.
In my mind I see a huge displacement coming for a large number of workers who get ousted by AI. There will still be jobs, but far fewer in each discipline. Think office workers and coders etc. Once ai matures and integrates, we are going to have millions of people without jobs as companies cut 80 to 90% in each department. UBI will be necessary and everyone who sells shit will know that it exists and we are back to square one because they increase prices. It seems hard to avoid.
To be clear, I’m all for UBI. It seems like its pretty much unavoidable as productivity per worker continues to sky rocket and wages remain the same.
There have been UBI trials before and they found that it didn’t lead to price increases to any great degree.
The issue being we’ve never seen an actual trial of UBI. It’s always some sample of the population for a known limited time. UBI as a concept doesn’t lend itself to “trials”, we won’t really know until at least a number of entire cities are indefinitely implementing UBI, and probably would be 3 or 4 years before people start actually acting like it is indefinite.
Same thing happened to college financial aid. The more aid given the more colleges raised the prices.