[chiph]

The back-of-the-envelope math I've done for the US indicates that to give families BI equivalent to the current poverty level (about $16250) means the deficit would double (annual expenditures would go to about $7tn). This was even after removing about half of the payments made to individuals & families under the current system (you'd have to leave Social Security for example, since it's a paid-in-advance system)

I agree that it's a worthy/interesting goal, but the numbers just don't support it.

[toomuchtodo]

Do we have enough food for everyone? Yes.

Is there enough clean, renewable energy available? Yes.

Can we provide everyone free mobility yet? Not quite, but lots of folks are working on electric, self driving cars.

What does that leave? Housing, health care, and education? Well, there you have it. The places we need to rapidly drive the marginal cost down.

[dTal]

I'm not sure I agree that there's enough clean, renewable energy - indeed it's the one thing we're most desperately short of - but this is the right way to think about economics. Too often people get distracted by the pretend numbers, and forget to look at the "raw" situation which provides insight. This can lead to absurd opinions like "breaking windows is good for the economy because it employs glazers" - yes, careful thought shows that the reasoning is fallacious (the money spent on glazers could have been spent elsewhere), but it's much quicker to trust in the common-sense principle that breaking stuff can't possibly create wealth.

Example: UK housing. There are hundreds of thousands of empty houses in the UK, roughly 10 for each homeless person or family - and yet there is a "housing shortage". The economics of supply and demand tell us that this shouldn't really happen, but it does. Investigating further, one finds that many of the empty houses are owned by people who cannot afford to renovate them to a standard where they can legally rent or sell them; like with the minimum wage, our so-called "standard of living" so impacts the liquidity of the market that many are forced to do without entirely. That doesn't mean that standard should be lowered, only that liquidity needs to be restored somehow - if those landlords were only lent the money they need to renovate the houses, they'd soon make the money back in rent. Therefore we do in fact have the resources to house everyone, just like we have the resources to feed everyone. But, through the pretend numbers, we've convinced ourselves we can't.

All economic resource problems can be categorised into "not enough resources" (increasingly rare nowadays, and soluble by technological development) and "not enough liquidity" ( e.g. "we have enough to go around but the pretend numbers say we don't").

A cute liquidity parable: http://economyblog.ncpa.org/the-tale-of-the-100-bill/