[noonespecial]

Not quite:

Consider a society with 2 members, Mr Rich (net worth $10M) and Mr. Poor (net worth $100). Mr. Rich is 100,000 X richer than Mr. Poor right now.

Institute a ridiculous UBI of $1M/year for everyone. At the end of the year, Mr. Poor has $1,000,100 and Mr Rich has $11M but Mr Rich is now only ~ 11 X richer than Mr Poor.

Now sure cheeseburgers at Micky-D's are now $700 but the fact has changed that before, Mr Rich could buy a hundred thousand burgers for every one Mr Poor could buy. Now he can only buy 11.

UBI works like gravity. Continually pulling the unequal towards a center. The rich will still stay rich, but unlike today where rich automatically makes richer, the force will be reversed. It will take "energy" to stay rich.

[djrogers]

But what if Mr. Rich was rich because he owned a McDs? Now he's selling burgers for $700, and rolling around in his money like Scrooge McDuck.

Prices go up for two reasons, when they can and when they must. Which one do you think would be the factor here?

* Note, this is specifically in response to the parent's scenario - I actually doubt that a UBI like the one in the article would lead to appreciable inflation, as the current entitlement plans already spread around more money than this would.

[noonespecial]

I think the most popular opinion around here is that once Mr. Poor is liberated by the UBI from the impossible treadmill of minimum wage working-poor jobs and a legal system that is outright hostile to those of lesser means, he might make a few burgers of his own and compete with Mr. Rich's defacto monopoly instead of being his near-servant at his former Mcjob.

[zenogais]

What are the pros and cons of this economic gravitational force?

[noonespecial]

Well that's the question, isn't it. What are the (un)intended consequences of forced leveling of inequality? Especially automatic and predictable forced leveling.

Right now, it seems that Mr. Rich eats as many burgers as he wants (which isn't many really) while all of the Mr. Poors who would be happy to eat them if they could afford them, and happy to make them if someone would buy them (and then could afford to eat them themselves) sit around hungry because there's a recession donchaknow.

Its almost as if the mass of Mr. Rich's on-paper money is blocking the natural signalling between the makers and the eaters so the cycle jams up. It seems like something that needs fixing. So how?

[zenogais]

I didn't really see any weighing of the proposition here, just motivated reasoning. Such a one-sided view is especially scary because, at least to me, the cons for this are pretty apparent and serious.

What's one big negative of funneling even more money into the government? Further centralizing power in the government, which definitely cools my own fever to implement UBI, and definitely warrants some careful consideration. Since trust in government seems to be at an all time low, this point probably deserves some addressing [1].

[1]: http://www.people-press.org/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-government...

[mapt]

For one, theories of economy were created in order to better serve the people's needs and wants using scarce resources - if they can be demonstrated (as in western Europe) to represent very large increases in the hedonic calculus, they are objectively superior. For two, a liberal democracy's functioning is premised on a degree of middle class participation: a large group of people with sufficient assets that they have a stake in the future (beyond entertainment value), but insufficient assets and numbers too great to corrupt the system towards their own ends.

[dragonwriter]

> if they can be demonstrated (as in western Europe) to represent very large increases in the hedonic calculus, they are objectively superior.

The only way this could be true is the extraordinarily unlikely case where every individual provably had better experienced utility in one system than another, otherwise, the fact that there is no one objectively correct method of aggregating utilities across individuals to get a single measure of societal good means that there is no objectively correct ordering.