frostbiker

You mean mixing businesses and residential units in the same walkable neighborhood like we've done for thousands of years? That would never work! We must maximize commuting distances in order to reduce traffic and commuting times.

I saw the effects of a real estate bubble in Spain 25 years ago, whose effects still ripple today. It started with young people feeling squeezed out of the housing market, staying with their parents for longer and either having child's late or not at all. Then came the lines at the food banks.

This appears to be where we are today in Canada.

Next, foreclosures and a major recession. It is hard to overstate how painful this was to watch even as a bystander, you will see why in a moment. In most cases it goes smoothly and simply contributes to raising rent prices. In other cases, the police would get involved to evacuate people from their (former) homes. Tightly-knit communities would rally around the home that was being foreclosed to stop the police and delay the inevitable.

Sometimes the people whose home was being foreclosed, especially older people, would jump out of their windows to their death as the police were entering. This happened dozens of times, to the point where you become numb to the horror.

Sooner or later extremist political parties emerge and gain popularity, both extreme left, extreme right and regionalist. They offer "obvious" populist solutions to the crisis, from wealth redistribution to clamping down on immigration and a return to "traditional values". The status quo parties may form temporary coalitions with the extremists in order to form a government.

Once they reach power and and are still unable to solve the underlying economic crisis with their "obvious" solutions, citizens become disillusioned and revert to the former status quo parties.

Nothing lasts forever, and over time the economy starts to limp forward again. It can take a decade or more -- see what happened in Spain and Japan at different points of the last forty years. The lasting result is a long period where few babies are born while the remaining population continues to age as usual, placing public pensions in a tight spot unless immigration is increased. The country's infrastructure, education and healthcare will have seen better times.

Will things unfold somewhat differently in Canada? Without a doubt. But history tends to rhyme, and what I've described above is hardly unique to one country.

Even if you have a fairly narrow economic view of what it means to contribute to society, there is no question that retirees are making those contributions

How does their volunteering compare to the forty hour weeks they used to work, on average? How specialized is the work they do compared to what they used do do, on average?

When we remove the incentive for people to do something, they do it less.

Any early retiree is most likely a billionaire

My kid's teacher retired at 55. So you think she was a billionaire?

so by definition they weren’t even contributing that much to begin with, probably just hoarding generational riches.

So rich people don't contribute to society because they don't have to work in order to live. However, people under a UBI will be very productive because they don't have to work in order to live?

A pensioner is someone that by definition already contributed the most they could to the economy

Not really. There are plenty of healthy early retirees. Do they on average contribute more or less than before they retired?

As experience has it, plenty of pensioners continue to work even after retirement.

What percentage? How does that compare to what they did before?

There is a general problem in mass psychology where people sitting around a table or in their armchairs try to imagine the impact of a policy without conducting a study or looking at historical results.

Let me present some more historical results: retirees. Do pensioners contribute more or less to society than before they retired? Are they a net contributor or a net drag? A UBI turns everybody into a pensioner.

The two situations are not identical, but they give me pause.

But in general, people want to do cool things, even boring or simple things, as long as they feel they are contributing to something good.

Do people who retire contribute to society more or less than they did before retirement? Pensioners are the closest thing we have to a long-term UBI today.

Let's not conflate income and wealth. With a living wage you may not be able to accumulate wealth, but at least you will have your daily essentials covered.

My concern with a universal income is that it discourages healthy people from working and thus contributing to our collective wellbeing. So while in principle it helps some people who currently fall through the cracks of our welfare system, it also reduces the pool of people contributing to it through their taxes. Is it a net win? I don't know.

If bears kept killing people in our cities, would we do something about the bears, or would we blame people for being mauled?

We need to design our streets to be safer, which involves incorporating traffic calming measures so that drivers will choose to drive at speeds that are safe for everybody.

Shit, they have a fuckload more parking than they need because it is mandated by law. Remove car parking minimums and set up bike parking minimums instead.