Old and disabled people -- particularly if poor -- may find it easier to get about in cities, as places they want to travel to will be nearer and there will be more public transport.
And by doing that you're making economy healthier. By propping up big cities you're contributing to feet of clay situation.
Worse compared to that? Channeling more money to landlords in SF and NY?
It's basically people on early disability choosing between whisky on payday and making extra buck on hauling other people like them around.
Face it, many less-fortunate areas are on the bottom already even in developed nations.
Failing that, let them eat cake.
Uber, taxi service, and most forms of public transportation do not exist at all in rural areas.
Anyway, out here in the middle of nowhere, Uber, taxi and (high frequency) bus service are not economically viable. Low population means low numbers of fares means low suppliers means long delays for service means lower numbers of fares. All of which is made worse by distances.
Medium and large cities do have taxi service and public transport, but those are lower priority since everyone has a car.
WRT "made worse by distances" Bay Area is actually pretty sprawling itself. I don't think any rural community will have its points of interests further apart than Bay Area has.
But even these are for micropolitan areas with populations on the order of 40,000. There is still no service for more remote areas.
Once you can't pay your rent and apply for subsidies, naturally we should see where the compromise is.
Otherwise you will not help yourself landing in the situation where X can fit in a city comfortably, but 10*X people consider the particular city the center of their life. What do we do?
Who said money should buy you the right to a life with strong social bonds?
Some things, including the ones mentioned above, should not be on the market.
Augmented social bounds with economic ones.
Germany is traditionally a country with low personal wealth, low homeownership rates. On the other hand renting is relatively cheap. Most people simply cannot afford to buy property. Already in Nürnberg, which is the second biggest metropolitan area in Bavaria after Munich where the housing prices are around half of that of Munich people with normal wages struggle to be able to acquire a home.
So basically you are working like an ant, but with grasshopper's security[0]? Maybe it's time to change that?
> On the other hand renting is relatively cheap.
Not anymore now that winter is here!
0. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fables_(La_Fontaine,_tr._Wrig...
On the the US’s historical economic strengths was the ease with which people could move in order to find work. One major influence in the US is economic slowdown of the past decade or so comes from peoples inability to move to find work
Can you see a problem here?
I also see the value in pop 13 in california (for residences, not commercial) at the same time I see its problems.
Few solutions are effective (nor problems soluble) when cast in black and white.
It's well inside of my control to demand that my taxes are not wasted on subsidies going directly to rent-seeking landlords in already economically overheated areas.
I would prefer they go to underdeveloped areas and give more economic effect. This means that people asking for subsidies should be ready to shift away from the core.
Is that more fair?
Now I can either be poor in my home town (no good jobs) or poor in a big city, where my wage is largely consumed by high taxes and rent. Why do other people deserve a subsidized house but I don't? I want more disposable income too.
800 Euros is quite a lot for rent.
Germanys wages are that low that other EU countries (France, Italy for example) find it hard to compete in terms of labour cost.
I think that's also the main cause of Germany being "Exportweltmeister" every year.
[1] http://www.dw.com/en/germanys-labor-costs-rising-faster-than...
[2] https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/german-labor-co...
[3] https://www.destatis.de/DE/ZahlenFakten/GesamtwirtschaftUmwe...
They might've grown above EU average since then, but they certainly got some catching up to do.
Real wages have increased since '07, yes, but that was also the lowest year in decades. The fact is, that it's barely above where it was 25 years ago: http://www.bpb.de/cache/images/7/61767-1x2-article620.gif?FF...
And I don't see, how the reunification of Germany would've caused real wages in '07 to be lower than in '93. I'm no economist, but Hartz 4 and the Agenda 2010 in general seem like a more plausible cause to me.
Several reasons. The botched currency union led to inflated wages (in no relation to productivity) in East Germany in conjunction with the Treuhand mismanagement to Germany being the sick man of Europe, with unemployment rising to 10%+. To this day, employees in East Germany earn about a quarter less than in West Germany. Production was outsourced to Eastern Europe, and Eastern European workers started to compete with German workers. You may remember that Volkswagen went from a 5-day to a 4-day week in late 1993 with a proportionate reduction in wages to save jobs. Wages are not immune to the laws of supply and demand, and consequently they stagnated. Reunification was an economic disaster and it took Germany a long time to recover from that.
> I'm no economist, but Hartz 4 and the Agenda 2010 in general seem like a more plausible cause to me.
Except that they've pretty much constantly grown since then, except for recessions. That's an indisputable hard fact. Real wages stagnated between 1990 and 2007 and have been rising since then. Whether there's a causal connection between Hartz IV and the rise in wages is something that nobody knows, but given that Hartz IV was introduced in 2005, it pretty much could not have had an effect before then, barring a time machine.
Because there's plenty of real estate offered cheap once you don't have to hang out near a big economic center?
Real estate is commodity in many places, why won't it be? People will just move there.
Less stupid people would move to a location where UBI will allow comfortable living for them.
People may end up not so stupid. Imagine you live in SF, you've got $500 UBI while your rent grew $300. This leaves you with extra $200 of leg room, yay for UBI!
For me, UBI would need to have an expectation that people may have to move around a bit as it is introduced, they would have a choice on where to go though.
Condensed space with a lot of working class people... Best place to beg.
(We should probably pay subsidies to old/disabled people on condition that they move away from centers of economic activity and into more rural, economically depressed areas)