So those in cheap areas with no jobs can never move to the areas with jobs?

I don't think it's a static system. Guaranteeing an income to everyone in those cheap areas could also have the effect of creating jobs in those areas because people would have money to spend.

They could. Or those areas could dissolve in a spiral of depression and alcoholism

That's happening right now, to a large extent because anybody with any get up and go has got up and gone.

That assumes these people are incapable of ever being productive. That's a different issue then just missing the economic opportunities to allow the communities to grow.

I'm not sure how you got that from what I said. There's nothing preventing people from moving out of those areas and getting jobs elsewhere. In fact, there would be a pretty strong incentive to hire those people because they would likely be willing to work for less than incumbent locals, which is pretty much the system we already have in place for many kinds of labor (not to mention outsourcing to cheap labor areas in the US that happens today). Additionally, freeing people in cheap areas from having to work shit jobs just to survive has the large upside of freeing those people to work on things they either care about or that have better economic potential than barely making rent.

My point is: UBI should only enable people to subsist on government income if they are willing to live in cheap areas with not-so-comfortable living conditions. Some people will jump at this chance, and that's fine. Many other people will decide they want to live in more desirable locations or increase their standard of living and will need to supplement UBI with other income accordingly. If we try to make UBI location-specific it opens up all kinds of arbitrage opportunities and weird incentives that I don't think most people want.

> "There's nothing preventing people from moving out of those areas and getting jobs elsewhere"

How about family ties? How about ties to their friends and community? These are human beings you are talking about, not robots. At a time when societal problems relating to atomization are increasingly evident (e.g. https://psmag.com/social-justice/americans-are-staying-as-fa...), we hardly need to encourage more of it.

> "UBI should only enable people to subsist on government income if they are willing to live in cheap areas with not-so-comfortable living conditions."

Oooh, yes. We could also give these cheap areas with not-so-comfortable living conditions some snazzy label like, say, "ghetto", "favela" or "slum". /s

Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? It's destructive of the curious conversation we're trying to have here.

All your substantive points can be expressed in the curious style instead. Just be thoughtful, respectful, and open rather than snarky, indignant, and confrontational.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

They can apply to jobs elsewhere and move closer when hired.

Right now those in cheap areas get 0 dollars. Getting 15k per year would be a vast improvement in terms of government sponsorship.

Sounds a little like the Indian reservations.