Ruben Anderson
2 min readNov 22, 2016

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Thanks for all your thinking and writing about UBIs, Scott. I was pointed to your page by Ian Alexander.

I don’t think my concern about the long-term prospects of a UBI has been addressed here, so let me explain my fear, and I would love to hear your thoughts, if you still are monitoring this post.

My concern is in the intersection of consumerism and capitalism, so I find it hard to unpack.

“In the Old Days” a man could work in the mine or the whatever, and buy a house and food for his family, and maybe a car and a TV.

Then, the spouse started picking up some odd jobs, maybe mending, maybe cleaning houses.

After a while, both parents needed to be working full time to keep the heat on and the cupboards full.

Now, in order to buy that same house, you need to put a suite in the basement, maybe do some AirBnB. A night job or a weekend job is not out of the question for one of the adults. Maybe a little Uber driving.

So what we see is a constant ratcheting up—so that each person literally must work more than full-time, plus have rental income plus other side gigs.

And to be fair, in the Old Days, they weren’t paying for granite countertops, so the consumer is quite complicit in the rathceting.

But, given this is our current reality, I don’t see how a UBI will not just be seen as another lemon to squeeze juice out of. It raises the floor.

I thinkit needs to be accompanied with at the very least, rent control. Here in BC, the government sets how much rent can be raised each year—but at the current rates, rent could DOUBLE in just twenty years. That will gobble up a UBI pretty fast.

Thanks for your thoughts.

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