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Basic income isn't intended to pay for luxuries such rent/real-estate in Manhattan. If one wants to live a very high quality of life in a desirable place, one will still have find a way to make enough money to afford that outside of basic income. The idea is to lift the very bottom of the income distribution, those who are likely to be put out of work first by automation, to a level where they are not plagued by a desperation for basics that causes them to damage themselves and society (i.e. drug abuse, crime). People in that situation already represent a significant cost, both in dealing with the problems, and also in the lost human potential. The hope is that as automation reduces the cost of a lot of basic consumables (not rent or real estate), fewer people are kept in the aforementioned desperation. With automation, these consumables will also not vary tremendously in price between Manhattan and Wichita, since the one of the biggest differences in production costs between both places, labor, has been removed from the production costs. Therefore, there would be no need to index BI by location. Basic income can't solve the problem where automation has effectively removed all human-added value in all jobs. At that point, we'd have to impose more dramatic measures of redistribution, and also come up with new ways of measuring individuals' contributions to the general welfare, and reward them based on that. But I think we're still far away from that. |