If I read that info right, their project took the free money away if you worked. Of course that be a disincentive. That’s not being proposed here.
Okay, fair enough and that’s a good point. I think it’s time for mankind to develop a new economic system for the post-scarcity economy, but that’s way beyond my ken. But we do need to find a different way to govern and live that’s not so centered on money. It’s the same whenever someone suggests that Americans earn too much money so we’re not competitive with the world’s labor pool, so we should have our salaries cut. Well, you can do that as soon as landlords cut rents, utilities discount gas and electric, and etc. In the meantime…
So is geographic isolation to prevent the UBI state from being flooded with ne’er do wells a requirement to make it function properly? Does that mean it might be workable in Iceland or the UK or Scotland, but not the USA as a whole?
I suspect it makes small-scale testing easier if movement is restricted. If everyone in the country has it then that’s less of an issue, since immigration is already restricted.
If we are going to do a more widespread test (y combinator is doing a limited test within California but it’s small scale and not city wide) then I think starting with a city is fine.
If you are going to go with a city though you need to restrict it to residents of the city and not allow anyone who shows up to get the income else the costs would spiral without more widespread funding.
The interesting things to measure city wide would be to test what effects a UBI would have on local inflation, especially in things like housing/rent costs. Ideally it would be interesting to test cities with more constrained housing supply and stricter zoning laws and a city with looser standards that allowed for more building and supply to increase the supply of living spaces and drive down housing costs. In San Francisco things are quite restricted and no one wants to increase supply at a rate large enough to allow more people to live there affordably. Self interested nimbyism, and self interest in their own property values and views of the ocean.
It’s sad, San Francisco and the general bay area is one of the few places in the nation that has enough concentrated wealth and technology fueled industry to create a modern dense west coast version of NY, but better.
Can you imagine if they let them build San Francisco to something like neo seoul out of a sci fi movie?
But no, no more building, roadblock after roadblock. What about my desire to see more exotic futuristic metropolises?
I have read that many UBI tests in places like Africa explicitly do NOT restrict movement, part of the goal is to see if the UBI makes it easier for people to migrate to some other location where they have better job prospects. So while I’d restrict a smaller citywide test to residents of the city initially for a period of years, I would not drop the UBI if they left for greener pastures somewhere else.
Please tell us where so that we can read too.
That’s where I read that.
It would work with the US at the national level because we can control who is entitled to legally reside in the US. A state cannot. Its one of the reasons why almost every senior at Berkeley is a California resident even thought they only make up two thirds of the entering class.
UBI is a big deal. If its actually enough to live on, its a big deal.