Also what kind of effect on pricing it would have. Surely if everyone's baseline income increases, it creates a safe buffer-of-a-sort that necessities' prices (housing, food) can comfortably consume.
I do wonder what the inflationary effects of UBI would be. In areas where there simply isn't enough spacious housing to meet demand (which includes most of the internationally known cities in the west), you'd expect to see rents rise - not really changing much.
However, people often want to live in these areas because jobs are there. The trend over the last 40 years has been for the decline of industrial areas as factories close. In most post-industrial countries there's towns and cities with really cheap housing - because there's no high paying jobs nearby. I wonder if UBI would have a longer term effect of injecting money into these areas, increasing prosperity and drawing in people who live in expensive cities but have seen their UBI get inflated to zero.
I don't think food (as in, grains and vegetables and meat) will be subject to the same inflationary problem - there's not the same fundamental supply limit that you get with housing in a city.
In the US we’re nowhere near running out of space.
I live in one of the most wealthy and densest areas in the US and like to go up to the roof of the building. When I look out it’s pretty much just trees with some 1-3 story buildings and lots of parking lots with occasional clusters of high density buildings like the one I live in. 30-60 miles south of here it’s almost completely undeveloped nothingness (some farms and gas stations but mostly forest.) The rest of the entire state (Save a few small cities) is like that too.
That so many people in the US can’t afford housing is a spectacular social failure. It feels similar to California’s water problem; yes it’s possible to run out of the resource but if you actually look at how it’s used it’s just very very poorly allocated.
Housing prices are barely correlated with incomes in a meaningful way across cities, let alone caused by them. See [1]. The #1 determinant of housing prices is supply, which is usually an issue of regulation, not of local ability to pay rent/mortgage. There's not much consensus on this topic among economists since there are so many confounding factors - the best paper I've seen so far is [2] which finds that income increases via minimum wage hikes might increase rents anywhere from a quarter to a half of the wage increase, absent other factors.
However, people often want to live in these areas because jobs are there. The trend over the last 40 years has been for the decline of industrial areas as factories close. In most post-industrial countries there's towns and cities with really cheap housing - because there's no high paying jobs nearby. I wonder if UBI would have a longer term effect of injecting money into these areas, increasing prosperity and drawing in people who live in expensive cities but have seen their UBI get inflated to zero.
I don't think food (as in, grains and vegetables and meat) will be subject to the same inflationary problem - there's not the same fundamental supply limit that you get with housing in a city.
I think we should try it though.