The real solution is to regulate the industry and break up monopolies. UBI is the modern equivalent of Walmart workers on Medicaid and food stamps. It’s raiding public funds for private profit.
Musk's idea of a Universal High Income (where money is no longer necessary because robots and AI give us anything we want) sounds great too until you consider scarce resources like land. Who decides who gets to buy the best properties on Earth if money is no longer a factor? What if you want, say, a human hair stylist or therapist: who would do such a job if they don't have to? We would lose the human touch in our lives, and that sounds awful.
https://www.digitalistpapers.com/vol2/autorthompson#:~:text=...
The only way? Like a silver bullet? Like that thing that the common idiom says doesn't exist?
In my mind, only community ownership of the means of production can truly achieve what we desire. Of course with all distant goals, it is hard to see how we get there. And to be clear I do not mean state ownership.
But I am curious, on my basic point of elite capture of the state, does that make sense?
I am struck that TFA’s title says UBI is “the only way to share”, amusing to me since literally directly sharing is another way. I understand we all have spooky ideas of what that means, but think for example of the concept of library economies. You borrow what you need, but you don’t own it nor have the right to destroy it. We share.
A better yet more difficult model is universal basic resources (food stamp to exchange for packages, social housing, etc.). People can work X hours on these social projects after reviewing some training (e.g. training of plumbing to maintain the social housing apartments). This also gives them some meaning in life. Of course this will degrade in the future if there is no ownership of the state by the people, but I think it’s going to last longer.
Unfortunately, with regulatory capture at near 100 percent and electoral capture almost as bad, there is no incentive structure with sufficient influence to make it happen. Wealth will continue to be funneled to the top, and taxation schemes that act as a de-facto sales tax create incentives that favor even more centralized systems.
But wouldn’t it be great?
An interesting aspect is that I am constantly observing innovators with significant technical and technological skills that are employed in fields outside of their expertise as a “temporary “ measure that often becomes permanent if they get further encumbered, simply because they can keel out an existence while trying to build the next cool thing. So we are wasting probably trillions of GDP in talent because people need to go work in a labor job to support their wife and child instead of continuing his very promising project in training data for humanoid robots, which could easily net 100m+ in the next decade. (Actual example. I offered him $1000 a month to keep on it, but he unfortunately needs more to survive and he has eaten through his savings over the past two years of working on it.)
I would prefer it illegal for the wealthy to possess an excessive amount of assets. If your assets became more valuable than the limit, the asset share would automatically rebalance toward other employees and owners in the organization who are below the asset ownership limit.
You don't even really need UBI if healthcare, housing, food, and education are considered basic human rights that are included and free of cost at point of usage.
1. The right-wing UBI is a tool to dismantle the social safety net. The idea of the likes of Milton Friedman is to replace all social safety programs with UBI. This doesn't make sense because, for example, being disabled in today's society makes everything more expensive; and
2. Left-wing UBI would seek to have everyone share in the wealth they create by supplementing social safety programs with UBI. UBI becomes a form of super-progressive taxation because it can be viewed as negative taxation.
As for your inflation comment, you have a point, to which I'll say: UBI alone isn't sufficient. You need economic reform and planning on top of that.
A good example is the US military. If you live off-base you get a housing allowance (ie BAH). Now around military bases, in the US and overseas, all the landlords know this so you'll find that weirdly all the houses to rent cost pretty much what BAH is.
So a more equitable economic system, including UBI, needs social housing. That is, the government needs to be a significant supplier of quality, affordable housing so landlords (private and insitutional) can't artificially drive up prices, as is the case now. A prime example is Vienna [1]. Housing simply can't be a speculative asset in a healthy economy.
If you wnat to see what an equitable planned economy looks like, look at China.
Also, aside from that question, prices will only rise if there's no competition. In a working market, if more people can afford a higher rent more apartments will be built.
If it's just printed money, it would be.
I haven't thought this through, but I don't see how you could have UBI without universal healthcare. If the point of UBI is to ensure the most basic necessities are covered, and "basic necessities" includes healthcare, and healthcare is the Luigi-inducing travesty it is in the US right now, how is it UBI without universal healthcare?
The alternative is that UBI is high enough to cover healthcare, which is extremely (maybe unfeasibly so) expensive and creates all kinds of other incentives for abuse. Or we fix the systemic, profit motive-driven problems in the current system by nationalizing healthcare.
Yes, nationalized healthcare is also problematic, but I think UBI will indirectly alleviate a lot of the systemic problems there as well.
You make it revenue neutral for the average tacpayer. If you want UBI to be $1000/month, you increase the average tax by $1000. The average taxpayer still benefit because even though they don't get more money, they have a safety net.
People making less than average get more UBI than the tax increase, and those making more pay more.
Most people get more money because the median income us a lot lower than the average.
This does not have to be the case if higher taxes decrease purchasing power for some.
It's effectively liberals seeking a liberal solution to mass starvation and obscene wealth inequality, they see a soon to be trillionaire like Musk alongside children starving on the street and try to find a solution within their narrow world view that demands the protection of capitalism, that's how it ends up so incoherent. It's same with the 'abundance movement' it's neoliberals seeking to fix neoliberalism with more neoliberalism.
Don't expect much clarity from these people, they are deeply confused and propagandized, to them their workplace is ought to be like family, collective bargaining is viewed as breaking the mutual trust you should have with your bosses. It's gibberish.
I have no faith in Musk's vision of an abundance utopia for many reasons, but I suspect a lot of people would still want to do the job of being a human therapist or hair stylist even if they technically didn't need to for money.
They may want to work less than 40 hours a week, but most people do have an inate need to feel like their life has some sort of productive value beyond just base level existing.
It makes no assumption about an elite ownership class at all. It merely assumes profits, and rearranges how those profits are distributed (away from shareholders, towards labor). There is no need for community ownership of the means of production (though that might have some different benefits, along with some different disadvantages).
You need high marginal (or maybe not even marginal) corporate taxes and a committment to the concept of UBI. Who owns the companies, from the perspective of UBI, is immaterial.
Community ownership does not share the productivity in sector A with workers in sector B. UBI does.
Source? A $20k UBI wouldn’t likely secularly increase food costs on a per-calorie basis. Those folks are already eating. There will just be supply-chain friction as the system adjusts to their newly-expressable preferences.
What are the falsehoods in complaints against police unions?
No, they are not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
Changing the table stakes is what needs to happen: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation for a counter example.
Unions just create an us vs them mentality. The fact that the NUMMI plant ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI ) was not reproducible is a pretty strong indicator of that.
Ah the “I am sure we can all agree … that I’m right” argument.
In actuality, there are plenty of very good arguments against unions. That you don’t like them changes nothing
I am a landlord.
I am setting prices for renewal.
I have come to learn that 100% of my possible customer base now has $200/mo more to spend.
I raise prices $200/mo with absolute certainty that I will find a renter.
Congrats, mission accomplished.
UBI is just a band-aid on not taxing the rich, though.
For example, how about supermarkets increasing prices? We already saw that happening for a few years since the COVID. And how about landlords increasing rents?
(Am I allowed to be a little ideological when we are facing the potential extinction of humanity?)
UBI is not possible until robots and AI take over most jobs (but then we risk that one day the AI decides to just get rid of "those useless humans")
Also, you haven't really answered the point. You may be able to get this established. But how do you keep it established? How do you keep the elite ownership class from dismantling it? (Based on historically observed behavior, the default assumption is that they will try.) If you don't have a plan that accounts for that, you don't really have a workable plan.
But, I will say, often, unions are very positive things. Other times, basically evil. So, I think unions are a mixed bag. But the threat of potential unionization is almost a universal good, so it’s a right worth exercising once in a while.
Housing prices should go down. Housing is expensive in places with jobs and cheap in places without jobs. UBI gives people the freedom to move from the former to the latter.
Healthcare is screwed up, UBI or no.
Cheap rental properties. Basic phone plans. Cheap food. The poor buy vastly more ramen noodles than the rich.
The subsidy isn't the problem per se, it's the net increase in income.
It is obviously self-evident everywhere that high incomes create high cost of living, which can be traced through higher costs all the way down to the land rents (the rent someone is willing to pay to have market access to the high local incomes).
But if the money is transferred to others and spent on additional goods & services that is when it increases demand and raises prices.
I am considering legislation for the next fiscal year.
I have come to learn that 100% of private landlords have increased their rents by the full amount of the UBI we introduced last year.
I ban private rentals and/or private ownership of homes and/or introduce strict rent control policies (depending on precisely how progressive we're feeling this year).
Congrats, mission accomplished.
What about California teachers’ unions? European notaries?
But inflation (sum total) is a moot point if total supply of dollars for total demand stays the same. Prices might temporarily increase for staples, such as shelter and food, but that should incentivize sellers in the economy to supply more staples, and fewer luxury goods.
The additional supply will eventually bring prices down, but end result is more people have more of the basics.
But saying that the existence of an elite class implies regulatory capture is a step beyond that.
Regulatory capture is absolutely a problem. While one could advocate for eliminating the elite class (e.g. wealth taxes, confiscation, execution ... as you wish), I'd probably go for tightly controlled political donations & spending, combined with a strong anti-corruption culture (which has been severely damaged by, ahem, recent administrations).
The core premise of a union is that you have solidarity primarily across unions which is actually how you get collective-bargaining at larger scales
[

Everyone should be treated as a shareholder in the Age of AI
There was a time in America when productivity growth and wage growth moved together. From the end of World War II until the mid-1970s, as productivity rose, pay rose with it. Workers produced more and earned more. That was not charity. It was the natural result of an economy that shared its gains with those who generated them.
That relationship is dead. It has been dead for half a century.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, since 1979, productivity has annually grown over twice the rate on average as typical worker pay. Before the late 1970s, these lines were practically the same line. Then policy choices — the erosion of the minimum wage, the dismantling of unions, tax cuts for the rich, deregulation — broke the link between what the economy produced and what most people received. The income generated by rising productivity did not vanish. It went into the salaries of top executives, into corporate profits, and into returns to shareholders.
A February 2025 study by the RAND Corporation put a number on it. Carter Price estimated the gap between what the bottom 90 percent of American workers earned in 2023 and what they would have earned had income growth remained as evenly distributed as it was in 1975. The annual gap in 2023 alone was $3.9 trillion. The cumulative total since 1975 was $79 trillion. Seventy-nine trillion dollars flowed upward, away from the vast majority of Americans, over five decades, because we allowed it to happen through deliberate policy choices.
Some will suggest raising the minimum wage would fix this. It wouldn’t. A higher minimum wage helps the lowest-paid workers but does nothing for the millions above it who have still seen their share of productivity growth erode. Some will point to unions. Restoring union power would help, and we should do it, but even at peak union strength, not every worker was unionized, and unions cannot reach into every home where unpaid care work — raising children, caring for aging parents — produces enormous value invisible to the labor market. No minimum wage increase or collective bargaining agreement will ever put a paycheck in the hand of a parent staying home with a child. Neither would a tax cut.
Universal healthcare? We should have it. Decoupling survival from employment is critical. But universal healthcare distributes healthcare, not the gains of productivity. Shorter work weeks? Worth doing as AI makes it possible to produce more in fewer hours. But shorter work weeks distribute hours of employment, not the wealth generated by the economy. A negative income tax? The net outcome can look like UBI on a spreadsheet, but an NIT phases out as income rises which is the same as taxing the incomes of only those in the phaseout range. It does not provide the same amount to everyone. It does not say to every person: you are a shareholder.
Only universal basic income does that. Only UBI distributes the same amount to every person, unconditionally, as a foundational floor beneath everyone’s feet.
Here is the strongest and most fundamental case for universality, and it goes beyond wages and productivity charts.
As the political economist Gar Alperovitz argued in his essay on technological inheritance in 2016, the overwhelming source of modern economic output is not the labor any individual performs today. It is the accumulated knowledge and technology inherited from every generation before us. MIT economist Robert Solow demonstrated that nearly 90 percent of productivity growth in the first half of the 20th century was attributable to “technical change” — a catch-all term encompassing technological innovation, accumulated scientific knowledge, improvements in education, better organizational methods, and any other factor that made a given amount of labor and capital produce more output than before. US per capita output grew roughly sevenfold over the 20th century. None of us individually earned that sevenfold increase. We inherited it.
This inheritance argument applies with full force to AI. Large language models were trained on text that billions of people wrote. Audio and video models were trained on audio and video that billions of people created. We all generated that training data. But it is impossible to determine who contributed what, whose data is being used most in any given output, or whose data is qualitatively more valuable. The complexity is irreducible. What we can recognize is that everyone contributed, and therefore everyone should benefit.
This is not an abstract philosophical claim. When someone puts up capital to fund a corporation, they often receive a dividend when that corporation matures and generates profits. Our collective human output — our language, our knowledge, our creative work — is the capital that built AI. We are the shareholders. UBI is our dividend.
The case for a universal dividend is further strengthened by the fact that the foundational technologies behind AI were funded by public dollars. Federal investment through DARPA has been the dominant source of AI research funding since the 1960s. The internet emerged from ARPANET. The NSF funded the research behind Google’s PageRank algorithm. DARPA’s Grand Challenges launched the self-driving car industry. Federal agencies have poured billions into the computing infrastructure, neural network research, and reinforcement learning that made modern AI possible.
We all funded the research that created AI. The appropriate return on that investment is not being told to go find another job. A return on investment is a dividend. We invested. We deserve our cut. And we all deserve to benefit even if we keep our jobs, because productivity will continue to grow, and the benefits of everything that got us here should not only go to one percent of people.
Do not offer us a new job as our dividend. A job guarantee is not an alternative to UBI. If someone loses their job to AI and a job guarantee helps them find another, that is useful for that person. But it does nothing for the person whose wages have been suppressed for decades. It does nothing for the parent at home. It does nothing for the retired person or the person with a disability. It benefits only those who take the guaranteed job. Everyone should directly benefit from productivity growth, not just those whose employment situation happens to qualify them.
The same applies to benefits targeted only at those who lose their jobs. Unemployment insurance is a net with holes. It only catches those who fall through a specific kind of floor in a specific kind of way. Meanwhile, everyone watches productivity grow and their share shrink.
We don’t tell stockholders that we can’t trust them with cash, so instead of a dividend, they’ll receive food or housing. That would be absurd. Cash allows people to determine for themselves what they most need. Universal basic services are fine as complements, but they are no substitute for cash in people’s hands.
The RAND study provides a useful benchmark. If the bottom 90 percent of Americans were shortchanged by $3.9 trillion in 2023 alone, that number has only grown since. Divided among every adult in the United States, we are looking at a dividend that should be about $1,390 per month here in 2026. Factor in a smaller amount per child — roughly $500 per month — and we are talking about a dividend that would end poverty in the United States.
The poverty line for a single adult in the US sits at $1,330 per month. Therefore, a UBI of at least $1,400 per month for every adult, with $500 per month for every child, would abolish poverty as we define it. This is not fantasy. This is the money that should have been flowing to all of us for decades and was instead funneled to a relative few at the top. The $79 trillion cumulative gap since 1975 represents what was taken. A wealth tax on a significant percentage of that accumulated concentration is not punitive. It is corrective.
Ideas like AI token taxes can help with the narrative for this. So can land value taxes, which connect to the oldest argument for UBI — the one Thomas Paine made at the founding of this country, that the earth is the common inheritance of all. Alaska has operated on this logic since 1982 with its Permanent Fund Dividend, and no Alaskan considers it welfare. They consider it their rightful share. That logic supports both a national resource dividend and an AI dividend.
But we should not get stuck on the tax question first. What matters most is settling on the amount and the principle: every American rightfully receives a universal dividend. Then we assemble the tax mix. If the annual figure is now north of $4 trillion, that is the full dividend target. Perhaps phase it in over five years to avoid a demand shock. But do it.
We cannot start crowning trillionaires while millions of Americans line up at food banks and millions more live stressed out lives of chronic financial insecurity. Those like Elon Musk exist at the end of a long chain of human achievement that every person who ever lived contributed to. It is wrong for one person to accumulate a trillion dollars based on what all of humanity built, while the rest of us are told to go retrain and compete on price with a robot or survive on gig work.
Productivity growth used to be widely shared. It has not been for fifty years. The inequality we have now is already worse than the First Gilded Age. We have the productivity and the resources to end poverty and significantly reduce economic insecurity for all. We have the moral and economic case for a universal dividend. What we lack is the political will to treat every citizen as a shareholder in the economy they comprise.
UBI is our rightful dividend. It is time to start paying it.
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However, people actually move toward higher COL areas as their income permits them to.
If more income meant people moved away from high COL areas, cities wouldn't exist. We'd have a flat distribution of people across approximately all land with ultra-low COL and ultra-low productivity everywhere.
I don't want a higher income, I want to benefit from the productivity gains I and everyone else made happen by having more time to do things I like.
Competition doesn't work for necessities. Someone will rent your room at any price because it's necessary for survival. One of the major crises of our time is the fact that there are more people who need housing than there are rooms to rent to them.
Why don't landlords undercut one another? They literally don't have to. The only outcome is less profit. You'll find a tenant eventually, at any price. Getting tenants in rooms a few months earlier at the cost of lower rent means you make less money, and are less competitive as a business.
I thought it was because they couldn't strike because they were "essential"?
Police unions in New York regularly join hands with other public-sector unions.
Why don't you just do that now and work half the amount of hours you're currently working?
> Why don't landlords undercut one another? They literally don't have to. The only outcome is less profit. You'll find a tenant eventually, at any price.
is very obviously not true, otherwise prices right now would be effectively infinite. Why are prices for an apartment in SF only 3k/mo instead of 30k? Surely under your reasoning a landlord could just wait and get a tenant at any price they set?
The answer is always supply and demand. As long as the supply is constrained or demand goes up faster the price will rise. But UBI doesn't change that math at all. (I say this as someone not actually a fan of UBI)
Fixing the housing shortage is a central tenet of progressive policies (regardless of whether or not they may ever actually accomplish this).
https://progressandpovertyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/P...
Show me the job like mine where this is an option, and I'll take it in a second. Hire another me and we'll split duties.
These sorts of "professional job that pays a professional hourly rate but is for 20 hours a week" are exceedingly rare. You'll usually be taking far less than 50% pay - far worse if you include benefits in the calculation.
I've been halfway keeping my eye open for such an opportunity so I could fund the basics of my life, plus have time to do personal projects with utterly no chance of monetary payback. Just stuff like paint the house, teach myself how to weld, work on backyard art, volunteer, etc.
I could certainly find a job that pays 50% of what I get now for working the same number of hours though. Perhaps moderately less stress and no "off hours" chance of being called in for an emergency. But that's not a great tradeoff since I'm looking to trade money for time.
This may not be the point you're making, but it really is sort of frustrating this isn't an option. I get why - I employ folks too and understand the overheads involved - but man it's the dream!
No, because local wages cannot sustain those prices
If local wages could sustain those prices, then yes all rents would rise to that new higher local income level
That is (quite self-evidently) prices are so phenomenally high in ultra high-income areas like SF
Every single landlord is setting prices by the same metric: what can the people who would live here be able to afford? Competition between landlords is almost nil, which is why you find almost no "deals" anywhere. The market is totally efficient. Everyone agrees on how to set prices: by local wages.
You're now talking about UBI, plus rent controls, plus state-built housing.
All to make UBI actually do anything at all other than enrich existing landlords.
Why don't we just skip the UBI and the rent controls and instead just have the state build housing?
UBI is a bad idea.
State-built housing is not necessarily a bad idea.
You can just do the latter and skip the former.
But, if the tenants now have more money in the form of UBI, then that argument doesn't hold.
And that's my point.
Your purchasing power will not change.
I do see what you mean, I think, now that I’m rereading and contemplating. A monthly stipend probably does more to raise prices than anything useful, unless you also pair it with regulation to stop the wealthy and powerful from taking it all for themselves. And at that point you could have just done those regulations without UBI. Hmm.
Do you think a few lump sum payments over a citizens lifetime would have the same effect? Maybe some large sum paid when you reach age of majority and then again at retirement?
UBI is passed from the tenants to the landlord in the form of higher prices, but is recouped by the LVT, which cannot be passed in reverse from the landlord back to the tenant.
The current problems have tended to arise when desirable work is geographically limited which then leads to a much larger housing shortage in those areas despite the presence of sufficient housing across a broader territory.
It benefits landlords.
Yes largely correct, but more specifically than "wealthy and powerful," I am referring directly to the landed class, wealthy or not. This type of infusion will ultimately be baked into the cost of land, which will propagate up to rent, then up to wages, then up to goods. The gains will accrue almost entirely to the landed class in the form of higher land rents with no symmetrical increase in costs because land itself does not incur costs.
> Do you think a few lump sum payments over a citizens lifetime would have the same effect? Maybe some large sum paid when you reach age of majority and then again at retirement?
It wouldn't have the same effect but it'd have an analogous effect in the localized markets in which those subsidies are applied. For example, you'd expect the price of land (and so rent → wages → goods) to increase where retiring people congregate. But it'd be less harmful to the exact degree that the subsidy itself is less broadly "helpful."
Your purchasing power is defined in a competitive equilibrium with your peers.
If you're assuming you can band everyone together to all decide to work fewer hours for the same pay, fine, but you just invented a union, not an improvement to UBI.
Yes, bad places at bad times.
Can you name good ones?
I don't know enough about economics these days to know if anyone who knows a lot about thus stuff thinks this is true, but it seems on the face of it to be absurd, since it would mean that pay raises are substantially diminished by rents paid for anything where demand is not elastic. I mean, I'm not insisting that cannot possibly be true, but it seems unlikely ...
When NYC had a housing surplus in the late 1970s, many people considered it to be a bad place. But even as they did so, a new generation of artists were moving into it. So was it a bad place at a bad time? Or a good place at a good time?
When Seattle had a housing surplus in the late 1970s ("Will the last person to leave Seattle please turn out the lights?" said the billboard in I5), many people considered it to be a bad place. But that was actually the beginning of a slow and steady population growth that now sees it as an incredibly desirable and expensive place to live.
Clearly, there are plenty of people for whom both cities were, at those times, "bad". But equally clearly, there are lots of other people for whom the very same places were, to some degree, just what they were looking for.
And these effects occur on even smaller scales. The neighborhood in London where I was born was basically a slumlords dream in the 1960s. Tons of empty housing, all very cheap (so cheap that my grandparents could afford a large home there). By the late 80s, it had become incredibly desirable and rather expensive. You can say "it was a bad place at a bad time in the 60s", but a bunch of people considered that an ideal place to be.
If we had completely equal distribution of financial resources, this sort of thing might be less of a factor. But as long as there are people looking for "value" and others looking for "luxury", the good/bad distinction doesn't really describe the world very usefully.
The relevance of this is amplified by the fact that land is a required input for all forms of production. People and machines must exist in space, and therefore demand land.
This does not apply to any other asset that we care about.