The bigger issue to me is that not all geography is anything close to equal.

I would much rather live on a beach front property than where I live right now. I don't because the cost trade off is too high.

To bring the real estate market into equilibrium with UBI you would have to turn rural Nebraska into a giant slab city like ghetto. Or every mid sized city would have a slab city ghetto an hour outside the city. It would be ultra cheap to live there but it would be a place everyone is trying to save up to move out of. It would create a completely new under class of people.

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ben_w 3 days ago | parent [-]

> I would much rather live on a beach front property than where I live right now. I don't because the cost trade off is too high.

Yes, and?

My reference example was two aircraft carriers and 1:1 models of some fictional spacecraft larger than some islands, as personal private residences.

> To bring the real estate market into equilibrium with UBI you would have to turn rural Nebraska into a giant slab city like ghetto. Or every mid sized city would have a slab city ghetto an hour outside the city. It would be ultra cheap to live there but it would be a place everyone is trying to save up to move out of. It would create a completely new under class of people.

Incorrect.

Currently, about 83e6 hectares of this planet is currently a "built up area".

4827e6 ha, about 179 times the currently "built up" area, is cropland and grazing land. Such land can produce much more food than it already does, the limiting factor is the cost of labour to build e.g. irrigation and greenhouses (indeed, this would also allow production in what are currently salt flats and deserts, and enable aquaculture for a broad range of staples); as I am suggesting unbounded robot labour is already a requirement for UBI, this unlocks a great deal of land that is not currently available.

The only scenario in which I believe UBI works is one where robotic labour gives us our wealth. This scenario is one in which literally everyone can get their own personal 136.4 meters side length approximately square patch. That's not per family, that's per person. Put whatever you want on it — an orchard, a decorative garden, a hobbit hole, a castle, and five Olympic-sized swimming pools if you like, because you could fit all of them together at the same time on a patch that big.

The ratio (and consequently land per person), would be even bigger if I didn't disregard currently unusable land (such as mountains, deserts, glaciers, although of these three only glaciers would still be unusable in the scenario), and also if I didn't disregard land which is currently simply unused but still quite habitable e.g. forests (4000e6 ha) and scrub (1400e6 ha).

In the absence of future tech, we get what we saw in the UK with "council housing", but even this is still not as you say. While it gets us cheap mediocre tower blocks, it also gets us semi-detached houses with their own gardens, and even the most mediocre of the widely disliked Brutalist architecture era of the UK this policy didn't create a new underclass, it provided homes for the existing underclass. Finally, even at the low end they largely (but not universally) were an improvement on what came before them, and this era came to an end with a government policy to sell those exact same homes cheaply to their existing occupants.

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sneak 3 days ago | parent [-]

Some people’s idea of wealth is to live in high density with others.

You bump up against the limits of physics, not economics.

If every place has the population density of Wyoming, real wealth will be the ability to live in real cities. That’s much like what we have now.

	▲	ben_w 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Some people’s idea of wealth is to live in high density with others. Very true. But I'd say this is more of a politics problem than a physics one: any given person doesn't necessarily want to be around the people that want to be around them. > If every place has the population density of Wyoming, real wealth will be the ability to live in real cities. That’s much like what we have now. Cities* are where the jobs are, where the big money currently gets made, I'm not sure how much of what we have today with high density living is to show your wealth or to get your wealth — consider the density and average wealth of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atherton,_California, a place I'd never want to live in for a variety of reasons, which is (1) legally a city, (2) low density, (3) high income, (4) based on what I can see from the maps, a dorm town with no industrial or commercial capacity, the only things I can see which aren't homes (or infrastructure) are municipal and schools. * in the "dense urban areas" sense, not the USA "incorporated settlements" sense, not the UK's "letters patent" sense Real wealth is the ability to be special, to stand out from the crowd in a good way. In a world of fully automated luxury for all, I do not know what this will look like. Peacock tails of some kind to show off how much we can afford to waste? The rich already do so with watches that cost more than my first apartment, perhaps they'll start doing so with performative disfiguring infections to show off their ability to afford healthcare.