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Re:What Is the Point of Universal Basic Income? by marcosdumay on Sunday February 02, 2020 @11:11AM (#22217583)
When you automate production, prices go down. That's something that can be verified empirically, and hardly anybody will disagree. But when you automate the entire economy, prices should go down towards zero nearly everywhere¹ - that's because when capital freely creates capital, all restrictions on production and competition become meaningless.

When you automate the entire economy, salaries also go down toward zero. That's even part of what allows prices to go down.

So, did workers become richer or poorer on the process? It's a 0/0 situation, and the answer to that question will depend entirely on the path both curves take into 0. But UBI makes that all irrelevant by adding a minimum bound on the numerator. For the purpose of fighting the problems of automation any reasonable amount will do, it doesn't matter that it looks too low today.

But of course, there are other goals that one can reach by UBI, and none of the above apply to those ones.

1 - There are obvious exceptions, some things are truly limited, and some things are limited by the government, culture, or other such forces. The cost of those are the real limit that will say whether the UBI value is too low, not today's cost of living.

Re:What Is the Point of Universal Basic Income? by naravara on Sunday February 02, 2020 @06:51PM (#22220325)
> that's because when capital freely creates capital, all restrictions on production and competition become meaningless.

Not at all. There are still plenty of limited factors in the production function. The capital itself isn’t unlimited, so you need to price in opportunity costs for using it. Much of the capital needs to support people providing services, so you’re still limited by the labor force for doing things that people prefer having humans do, like knowledge work or personal services.

And then you have to contend with the fact that resources are finite and capacity to extract them is too. We’re a very long way away from automated labor being so effective and so ubiquitous that it fully realizes all the benefits you’re talking about.

In the foreseeable future, it’ll probably be rather unpleasant as shitty robots replace competent humans, meaning the quality of services and products we get are bad but the good versions are prohibitively expensive. And the jobs making things start going away so nobody has the money income to get quality versions of things.

Re:What Is the Point of Universal Basic Income? by sykick on Sunday February 02, 2020 @11:52AM (#22217842)
Do you mean that production costs (prices) go down with automation or that the selling price to consumers goes down? If you meant the latter this is wrong. The selling price depends on the pricing power that the producer has. Consider for example monopolistic pricing power, cartel pricing power, and regulatory capture.
Re:What Is the Point of Universal Basic Income? by beerandt on Sunday February 02, 2020 @05:44PM (#22220011)
Also, for marginal prices to approach 0, you need a true commodity.

Even if this happens for most other needs / products, housing isn't a commodity, and I expect won't ever be. It will generally be demand driven in terms of relative housing costs, and if you're of the mindset that inequality in and of itself is the problem, the lowest tier housing will never be enough, no matter how sufficient.

Which will just lead to a larger part of newly disposable income being spent on housing.

We already know people pay based on what they can afford.