• Aceticon@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    If you make the maths, the direct inflactionary effects of UBI are quite small unless people were getting tens of thousands of dollars per month, and there are indirect effects pushing in the opposite direction (for example, fewer loans hence less money getting created by banks).

    You’re making claims that an entire domain supports your conclusion but haven’t even gone to the trouble of making the maths to confirm it - you just assumed.

    For example the “average household wealth” in the US is $1,059,470 and the average household size is 2.5, so an UBI of $500 per month for every man, woman and child of the United States (rounded to 300 million because I couldn’t be arsed to find the exact number) would depreciate that wealth (i.e. inflate its nominal worth) by about 1% per year (assuming 12x UBI payments per year). This is are only the first order effect, as indirect effects push in both directions (for example, it will push salaries at the low end higher, which is inflationary but not by much because it’s only lower salaries being affected, and it will reduce number of loans issued which reduces money creation and is thus deflactionary but again the strength of that deflactionary effect depends on actual proportion of loans that are not issued due to UBI making the money available).

    All together macroeconomics does not confirm the effect you claim it does (an in fact the Alaskan experiment shows the opposite) but even if you only consider first order effects, it shows an inflactionary effect which is around half of the FED’s anual inflation target, so a mild effect and certainly not justifying the statement that UBI “only works in a perfect society where the market doesn’t take advantage of it”.

    • Peaty@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Macro is the field that would support the idea that giving people more money would increase the sale price of things like housing.

      I don’t need to math out the inflationary impacts of UBI to make the claim that Macro backs the idea that giving everyone more money will increase the costs of housing. That’s historically demonstrable.

      The Alaskan income bonuses aren’t relevant to this because they aren’t large enough to have distortionary effects.