Food is not just laying around on the ground in most cases. It requires work to create it or render it useful and accessible. I don't think the analogy with stealing the air and selling it back is very good, because creating the air to breathe does not require work.
> Food is not just laying around on the ground in most cases
I can go foraging / hunting right now and find food, not enough to live off, but in a time before land ownership and mass population explosions, there would have been enough... Which... is the entire point of the article. So are you arguing for the premise of the article then?
The premise of the article would make more sense in a time before the mass population explosions you mention. Of course, those explosions could not have happened without the productivity gains from private property and free markets, along with science and other innovations.
In some sense most of our very lives are due to the systems the author believes makes us "a planet full of assholes".
...foraging and hunting is harder work than anything done by people complaining about not getting money for free from society as though the rest of us owe them our labor.
There isn't enough 'natural' food production to support 7 billion people with foraging and hunting. The premise of the article is bad. You don't have rights that don't make sense in the current era. Today it is impossible for everyone to stay alive without highly technologically complex industries with extremely high capital requirements producing the food we eat.
We live in an era where for most people if the government runs out of foreign exchange you end up with a famine.
> but in a time before land ownership and mass population explosions, there would have been enough.
That's certainly not true in the sense that modern agriculture allows for population densities that foraging/hunting lifestyles couldn't even dream of supporting. Also, tribes were very territorial about land and fought over it frequently. And people of the time were far more susceptible to changes in the environment: https://qr.ae/pr2Ah3https://qr.ae/pr2Ah3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQxEuXM_0eY&t=110s North American tribes were much smaller in number because they could support far less people per square mile. The Cherokee tribe, one of the largest east of the Mississippi, for instance, numbered around 20,000 in 1690, a paltry number compared to the size of the Aztecs or Maya, which numbered in the millions.
From the article: The thing is though, this isn't that far from what we actually did here on Earth centuries ago. Land used to exist without a monetary cost to access it. That was the natural way of things prior to the private property system and monetary system. We created poverty as we know it
this has to be the most disingenuous take on poverty I've ever heard. Most of human existence has been a struggle just to not die of hunger or exposure to the elements. Poverty in western nations today is worlds apart from that.
Also, from the article: We all would have inherited land, or at least free access to it, but in the process of creating civilization as we know it, we became dispossessed of our natural inheritance
Our natural inheritance is subsistence living amidst the constant threat of war, conquest, slavery, and the capricious whims of mother nature and lady fortune. Basically, the strongest survive and might makes right.
I think that by the time we had organized tribes fighting over land we were well into the dominant species / civilization / cooperative resource gathering phase. Thus it isn't really an argument against the main point of the article. So... I'm really confused.
That's a very non-standard view. Animals fighting over territory is quite common even in arbitrarily small groups, so why do you think conventional thinking - that these are hardwired behaviors present in every animal from crabs to primates and so were present in human nature from the beginning -- is so wrong, and your own views that these are only learned behaviors are correct?
> Land used to exist without a monetary cost to access it. That was the natural way of things prior to the private property system and monetary system.
All land / resources were staked out by small tribes of humans who might kill you for using it?
Yes, that is the process of "civilization" that he is talking about in the article. I'm starting to think that some of these comments are generated by someone typing "Give me a really generic conservative argument against UBI" into ChatGPT.
Ok, I'm almost convinced now that I am arguing with a ChatGPT bot. An actual human would know that given the context of the conversation this is a non-sense answer. No shit I can scour the internet for bad takes on any subject, wow, what a revelation!
I'm not presenting an argument against UBI - I am pointing out that his argument is flawed.
Small tribes of humans defending hunting/foraging grounds is a state of pre-civilization. Life required work then too, and things were worse. His premise is that things used to be better and we've made it worse. Hard disagree.
Land existed without monetary cost but had even worse costs associated with it - you had to defend it from other humans who would roll in and kill you for it.
Or, you couldn't do anything to access certain land, because the people who controlled it thought you said shibboleth the wrong way and would kill you if you tried to use that land.
> Land used to exist without a monetary cost to access it. That was the natural way of things prior to the private property system and monetary system.
Yeah, the "natural way" of things was that you and your tribe fought off and killed competing tribes trying to access your resources. This isn't particularly desirable, which is why monopolization of violence by larger entities was established.
But it's grounded in an incorrect belief that humanity existed in some kind of idyllic prehistoric state before civilization where nobody had to work. And we can return to this state of life.
Most contemporary evidence on hunter gatherer societies indicates the opposite: it was highly violent with intense competition between groups.
> But it's grounded in an incorrect belief that humanity existed in some kind of idyllic prehistoric state before civilization where nobody had to work. And we can return to this state of life.
No, that's an enormous strawman. It's saying one particular thing was better.
There's a huge diversity of social arrangements throughout history. Some of them communal and sharing, some warlike and taking; forced labor and not; monetary systems and not; etc. The quote you reply to is overly nostalgic and too simplistic to reflect realities of history, same with your comment.
Social arrangements throughout history are indeed quite varied. Social arrangements in pre-history and especially pre-agricultural societies less so. Absence of agriculture puts a much lower limit on the size of social groups, usually around 50-150. Rates of violent death vary from ~12-25% (as in asking the question, "what percentage of people died naturally or at the hands of other human beings?"), across multiple continents. This is considerably higher than agricultural societies, and vastly larger than industrial societies.
So what? Your utility function is one-dimensional, lifespan. Maximizing the productive lifespan of proles or serfs is optimal in a society where power is centralized, but you are discounting the value of autonomy to zero.
I reject the Hobbesian premise that other social forms should be dismissed as nasty, brutish, and short, and it's not for lack of familiarity with the anthropology of prehistorical conflict.
Show me a hunter-gatherer society that has social groups spanning hundreds of people or more. There's fundamental limits of food production and social organization without tools like agriculture to support larger population density, or writing to organize larger groups of people. You're asking me to prove a negative here.
You’re conflating carrying capacity with social arrangements, and directly say that lower carrying capacity reduces the variety of social arrangements.
You really think that contemporary Pygmies of the Congo, the uncontacted people of the Amazon, the 19th century Australian Aborigines, Cheyenne, Inuit, and Shawnee, along with the prehistoric of Central Europe and East Asia, are culturally indistinguishable beyond silly hats?
They're not culturally indistinguishable. But they absolutely share many similar characteristics distinct from both agrarian and industrial societies: all of them primarily interact and live in social groups much smaller than agrarian societies. All had rates of violence drastically higher than today.
Of course they have different languages, religious practices, etc. But that's not particularly important relative to the point I'm making: none of the societies you listed were examples of the idyllic noble-savage kind of society that popular culture tends to portray hunter gatherers to be.
> But that's not particularly important relative to the point I'm making: none of the societies you listed were examples of the idyllic noble-savage kind of society that popular culture tends to portray hunter gatherers to be.
Literally no one is making that point. What people (or at least I am) saying is believing all hunter gatherer societies are dominated strong man violence is pure fantasy that is informed by they’re own biases and wishes rather than actual data.
I disagree. It's stressful and dangerous, to be sure, but monopolization of violence by larger entities is fundamentally totalitarian. If I'm outnumbered and outfought by you, I have other strategic options. Under a state, merely expressing opposition to the way things are can be a criminal offense.
"Life requires work. You can't just expect to live without work, and it's wrong for someone to live off the work of others. So UBI has no moral justification."
How about:
"You're gonna want something that other people make or do or do to you. If they're not your parents or lovers or partners, you better have something to give in exchange for that thing you want. Otherwise, why would they give it to you ? Making something others want is work."
Also, the following statement is based on a false premise: “ Let's just recognize that Earth actually does belong to all of us, everyone in the present and future, and that those who own pieces of it, and who create things out of it, owe compensation to the rest of us for removing our access to what would otherwise have been common property.”
This implies that creation itself is some kind of theft. The actual theft is taking something from a creative, productive person and giving it to an idle one.
We want to encourage people with capital to invest it in productive new ventures instead of just hoarding it. This increases economic growth and generally benefits society. Thus we incentivize those investments through the income tax code.
At least that's the economic theory. If we were to raise taxes on dividends, no one can really predict how much that would reduce the long-term economic growth rate.
Wanting to encourage investment is more of an explanation for why the tax rate is lower than 100%. It's not an explanation for why it's lower than income tax.
Normal interest on savings accounts and short term investment gains are taxed as income. Long term investment income is taxed less than that, biasing in favor of investment.
Savings accounts have poor returns and don't need the help.
Is short-term investment that much less useful than long-term? Especially when the stock market is so big and smooths out short-term investments so much? We're effectively paying a lot of money for that bias, and I'm not convinced that's better than a tiny bias or no bias.
Savings accounts have poor returns, so investments don't need the help, right?
I could certainly be persuaded by that and maybe about short vs long term investment. Do we have data from other markets to compare?
Above I'm just explaining the reasoning behind the status quo. Reaction to that seems negative. I can't tell if I'm wrong about the reasoning, or people are signaling that the reasoning is wrong.
The level of capital investment people are willing to make is proportional to the expected return, net of taxes. So, you are essentially arguing about the shape of the curve. Would society be better off if dividends were taxed at 10% or 20% or 80%? The reality is that no one really knows because it's impossible to conduct controlled experiments and the system is too complex to model accurately. We're left to make policy choices based on intuition, ideology, and low-quality macroeconomic "science". Anyone who claims that a certain large-scale change in the tax code would definitely produce positive results is simply ignorant or arguing in bad faith; the reality is that we lack the ability to accurately predict second-order effects.
For example, consider the 10% federal luxury tax imposed in 1991 to reduce the budget deficit. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it devastated several domestic manufacturing industries and destroyed many jobs. Whoops.
Aren't high taxes on income from work a disincentive for people to work? How does the same logic not apply? By looking at the tax incentive structure, it is telling people: sitting on your ass doing nothing and being paid dividends (derived from the work of others) is more important than working a job yourself.
Assuming this is not a rhetorical question, the answer is:
Buying stock is investing cash into a business. The investment has more risk of going down in value compared to cash in the bank. Government created a tax advantage to partially offset the risk, and thus encourage investment. This tends to move capital to places it can be used for creating new things, instead of sitting in a vault.
Private property is a civilized abstraction that alleviates the requirement to kill people who enter land you've claimed for your own, for as long as you can defend it.
A made-up requirement, in which the centralization of abundance is justified on the basis of scarcity. Even in the feudal period, aristocracy came with obligations, like common access to land for purposes of passage or forage. Basically, this is just an excuse for people to claim more than they are able to use in the present, by asserting the necessity of them being able to do so in the future.
It's how national borders work.
A distinct negative, as far as I am concerned. Passports only became a thing around World War 1. Artificial restrictions on movement by labor is a massive economic distortion that essentially treats labor as a captive resource by mutual agreement between states. Would-be economic migrants whose goal is to work are equated with marauding armies.
That's also the time progressivism was peaking, and nation-states started creating centralized government welfare systems and engaging in Marxist revolutions.
Get rid of welfare states, and you can get rid of borders. But you can't maintain a welfare state with generous welfare subsidies and have open borders.
WW1 happened right after Roosevelt and Wilson got done debating who was going to be the best person to centralize state power in the national government in the mold of the social progressives. And just after Wilson outsourced American monetary policy to a banking cartel, which opened the way to unlimited war and an unlimited welfare state.
"The actual theft is taking something from a creative, productive person and giving it to an idle one."
"Productive" - we have people making livings selling farts in jars, but we value a stay at home parent at $0. Clearly we're abusing the word "productive".
There is value creation, and then there is rent seeking. The OP is proposing that the philosophical justifications of a UBI are based on the ever increasing amounts of rent seeking behavior that underpins our economy.
One example, intellectual property constraints are perpetually expanding due to an increasing number of patents, copyrights and trademarks. If you are a creative person, you are legally required to navigate this intellectual property minefield in order to make a living. Why shouldn't you get some sort of token compensation for the loss of creative rights?
Another example, I like to fish. But I am required by government regulation to pay for a permit and to limit my fishing activity to comply with regulations. The regulations are burdensome enough where it would be prohibitive to sustain my family solely on my fishing labor. This was not the case about a hundred years ago (roughly). One could sustain a family through fishing alone. I could try and go the commercial route, but that requires an investment of upwards of $100k and that industry is notoriously hostile to new entrants and extremely volatile (read up on snow crabs for example). So for all intents and purposes, this natural resource is no longer available to me to use as a primary source of sustenance. Why shouldn't I expect some sort of compensation for that?
And of course the big one, land rights. We give landowners perpetual rights to use a piece a land as long as they pay their taxes and comply with local zoning regulations. That land is not theirs. It existed long before they were born, and will continue to exist long after they are gone. But while they "own" that land, I am forbidden from using it. And there are fewer and fewer places in the world where land is free/cheap, and also somewhat economically useful. At some point in the future (if not already) we should expect that type of land to disappear entirely as capitalism continues gobble up all available opportunities. UBI feels like a natural way to compensate individuals for the loss of rights to this land.
Historically, citizens of modern well functioning democracies have considered the right to vote as sufficient "compensation" for the loss of certain natural rights. The right to vote is certainly a powerful and necessary right. But I think UBI is a more natural compensation for the increasing economic constraints that modern society imposes on its citizens. Fishing regulations help prevent fish stocks from collapsing, intellectual property rights allow creators to profit from their work, etc..., but these restrictions also narrow the legal space in which current and future citizens can make a living. Do we really need more and more people releasing shit coins and NFTs in order to squeak out a living? Do we really need more people optimizing facebook ad conversions? Maybe we just acknowledge that the vast majority of work being done in modern societies is not essential, and forcing more people to compete in that landscape is not making the world a better place. A small UBI isn't going to dramatically change peoples motivations. Freeloaders already find ways to skate by, UBI might make it a little easier. But maybe it is better if the freeloaders just take their UBI and chill rather than try their hand at another scammy NFT project. Even with UBI, the vast majority of people will continue to work as UBI would be too small to provide a comfortable middle class lifestyle. Maybe a few people might downshift a little bit and use UBI as an opportunity to focus on things that they consider important, i.e. family, hobbies, volunteer work, etc.. But is that really so bad?
I agree that implementing UBI right now is silly, but I do think there is a problem that must be solved. Eventually there simply won't be enough work to do for 100% of the population to do something useful (even for the incredibly generous definition of useful used today where finding new ways to show people adverts is the best compensated career available to most people).
Should half the population starve in such a society?
It's not going to be half of the population. We are approaching a world where 1% can contribute useful work and the other 99% cannot contribute anything beyond entertainment. Then the question is why should the 1% accept a governance structure where they get only 1% of the power for 100% of the work?
Which 1% of the population are you counting as doing useful work? From how I see it - those doing useful work right now are compensated far far less than those doing well paid but useless work
indeed, there is a lot of useful work that people could do that is currently not paid well. for example education, science, healthcare.... imagine what we can achieve, when all those who are not needed to sustain our life study science and research or medicine.
parents need not work but can focus their entire energy on raising their children.
or a different model, if 1% need to work 40 years to sustain us, then 10% can do the same while working only 4 years, or everyone only works one year. (ok, it doesn't scale like that because it takes more time to get experience for certain tasks, but even then, with such an abundance of available labor, every worker can spend half of their work time to teach others about their work)
all it takes is an understanding that the best thing to do with those not needed for work is to educate them to do something else that is useful for us.
That's a weird definition of "useful work" though. If they're not farming or manufacturing or distributing or maintaining things then why should they get significant power?
And if 99% of the population is too dumb to do it, then it probably doesn't need to be done.
Damn, you really don't have a high opinion of the bulk of the world's population. You really think it takes special geniuses to do those things, not just experts? 125 IQ need not apply?
The country with the highest percentage of PhDs is Slovenia, at 3.8% of 25-64 year-olds.
I know academic performance doesn't perfectly equate to IQ, especially at this level because right now smart people have many other options, but on the other hand that's the highest percentage and the OECD average is just short of 1.1%.
China I'm not sure about, but seems to be about 500k/year, so if I estimate population of 1.5e9 and 80 year life expectancy, that's a steady-state level of 3.75% of the entire population.
So the minimum for those things being above IQ 125 seems at least plausible. May not be correct, but it is plausible.
Farming, manufacturing, distributing, and maintaining things are all directly getting automated. The fist stage of this automation, when the automation wasn't computerised, was named "the Industrial Revolution", but automation didn't stop there, and computerisation is continuing to reduce human involvement in each sector.
As for "why should they get significant power?" — well, 'should' is a question of values. Do you believe in democracy and self-determination? Or is it fine to treat them all like animals, by which I mean spay, neuter, euthanise without asking their opinions, and/or selectively breed to be decorative and fit into handbags? Because the worst horrors that Charlie Stross and Ian Banks and Harlan Ellison have imagined are all as easy as Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism if you have an AI which can automate almost everything, regardless of whether anything remains purely in the domain of a tiny elite.
I'm going to support democracy. That's why I think an unemployable 99% should have, in a reasonable sense, 99% of the power.
I think you might have misread me. When I said "significant power" I meant that in a proportional sense. The 1% getting much more than 1%. I wasn't arguing against the 99% getting 99%.
Ah, thanks; that explains the apparent discrepancy between what I thought you were saying here vs. your other comments.
As for why the 1% may have much more than 1% of the power in practice… that's kinda where I was going with the Hyper-Dystopia vs. Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism example: whoever controls the AI gets to play as Gods to a much larger degree than mere billionaires get to act like real life is a Civilization/KSP/SimCity game, and the default for who controls the AI is whoever has skills such that they can't be replaced with an AI. Or the current rich, if everyone can be displaced by AI.
Why should the 99% accept a governance structure where they get only 1% of the power/wealth? I think the core issue is wealth inequality, and although I initially liked UBI, it doesn't really solve that issue. If we don't solve it, I wouldn't be surprised to see a situation where we end up with another failed attempt at communism/revolution and everyone loses.
The scenario here is one where 99% of people's jobs have been automated out, so I'm kind of assuming that there are tons of robots and the 1% are somehow necessary to control the robots. And then there can't really be a revolution because the 1% will just tell the killbots to kill the rebels.
I'm not certain of any specific percentage, but here's a thought experiment:
Imagine there was an AI which was normal compared to a human mind — as in, you can reasonably assign it an IQ score the same way you would a biological human, and the score wouldn't be biased by it doing the maths and memory puzzles a million times faster even as it fails a simple word game or is unable to either count or subitize a small number of objects in an image.
IQ scores are normally only valid in the "+/- 2 standard deviations" range, which by definition is IQ 70 to 130.
(IQ tests are just a direct mapping onto standard deviations, not at all a linear scale, so while I'm very impressed with ChatGPT, I don't know if it would always outperform an IQ 70 human or not, even though it can definitely sometimes outperform IQ 130 human).
Assume this AI's electricity bill is equal to Example Everyperson's wages.
If the AI has an IQ of 70, then 2.3% of the population are permanently uneconomical through no fault of their own; 85, then 15.9%; 100, then 50%; 115, then 84.9%, 130, then 97.7%.
What is the likely IQ of the first human-like AI whose electricity cost matches an average salary? And how fast is it likely to go up?
~~~~
From the other direction: I don't know for sure how much ChatGPT costs to run, though I think it's in the order of cents per response. What I do have is an upper bound for Stable Diffusion of $0.0001 per image, less than half of the $0.00022 it takes to keep a human (on the $1.90 per day UN abject poverty threshold) alive for 10 seconds to type in the prompt[0].
I don't know what the future of AI will be, but I suspect that it will be so cheap that that won't need to be a superior intelligence to all humans in all domains, to cause literally all humans in all domains to be uneconomical.
Those people with IQs below 70 are already uneconomical. I don't know where the line is for "we can find productive work for this idiot", but it's definitely higher than "cannot tie/Velcro shoes"
This is a pretty shrewd comment. It won't matter if an AI is more capable than a human, if it costs more to run that task than it would to hire a human. There are still people working in mines in poor countries because they're cheaper than the machines used in rich countries.
and the things that people actually value (lots of creative ventures) tend to be greatly undervalued to the point its hard to support ones self unless your and elite few
>Eventually there simply won't be enough work to do for 100% of the population to do something
People always claim this, yet with ever increasing population, we continue to find work for people to do. Who would have guessed when the Earth's population was 1 million people that'd we eventually have billions of jobs.
So there is really no reason for there to not be enough work to do. If each person consumes enough in life to equal once person's work output, then every additional person will work enough to get enough to consume for themselves by trading with others.
As long as people can trade the result of their effort for the efforts of others, there is no reason we will ever run out of jobs. In fact, there's likely now and always will be things we could do except we simply don't have enough workers to do it. Each big technological change in the past freed workers from previous drudgery and opened up large swaths of working people to provide labor for the next wave of innovation. There's no need innovation ever ends.
This scaling has always worked, from societies of a few people to countries with a billion people. And there's no shortage of work still to be done.
It's a good thing we have plenty of needed jobs, even when the everyday person doesn't understand reasons for those jobs, to the point of confusing their own ignorance with misguided malice to the workers doing jobs they don't understand.
It's the modern equivalent of tribespeople throwing rocks at the moon.
A good place to learn in life is when you don't understand why something exists or how it works, instead of immediately writing it off with intellectually lazy hatred and dismissiveness, spend some time understanding what came before, what problems the current solution solves, and why things are as they are. You'll be amazed and the nuance and insights generations of clever people solving problems have passed on for situations you currently don't see or understand.
You'll end up happier and have a better understanding of the world.
... and when people think quoting David Graber is an accurate assessment of reality. Or simply google ample rebuttals to Graber's entire thesis, well backed with empirical evidence, such as [1], "Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs", which categorically demolishes this stupid line of claims via careful empirical research across large numbers of people. "The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions."
And a large amount of people believing a thing are not the same thing as truth, as evidenced by countless mass misconceptions from the trivial to the insane.
The problem with ideas like this, just like any number of wild ideas, is that they're easier to manufacture than accurate explanations, so there's more of them, and people with itchy brains love to latch onto them, but they pass by over and over without people actually realizing they're all the same nonsense - wishful simple explanations for complex phenomena.
And then people regurgitate it over and over on the internet because it sounds nice to them, but they cannot be bothered to see what follow-up actual scholars did to debunk it.
For example, if all these jobs are bullshit, then start a company with none of them, and crush all the others since they're wasting sooooo much time and money and resources...
But that has happened exactly zero times. And will happen zero times more. Care to explain why short of invoking massive Illuminati world conspiracy nonsense?
> For example, if all these jobs are bullshit, then start a company with none of them, and crush all the others since they're wasting sooooo much time and money and resources...
Awesome to see a person in real life who thinks all markets are perfectly competitive and that there’s no such thing as anticompetitive behavior or fixed costs.
Awesome to see a person in real life given the chance to jump on a land mine just do it full heartedly :)
This is precisely why I asked "Care to explain why short of invoking massive Illuminati world conspiracy nonsense?".
And you jumped right in on cue.
None of your excuses stop thousands of companies from starting and succeeding every year. Yet none have removed the bullshit jobs claimed, making them even better, more efficient companies.
So your bogeymen are pulled out by you to justify a worldview mismatched from reality to sustain the belief (discredited as I pointed out above by ample academic empirical research) that so many jobs are bullshit, despite such easy evidence to the contrary, and, like all conspiracy Illuminati beliefs, self contradictory with even the evidence that companies start all the time.
Congrats.
It's easy to start a company - there are literally millions of them in the US, with thousands starting weekly. Nearly all have fixed costs, face the same marketplaces, and yet every year 100's of them get so big they float public IPOs. Most of the Forbes 400 richest people are first gen company founders, facing all your bogeymen that, I guess by your logic, would make it impossible to make successful companies.
So why are none of them smart enough to remove all these bullshit jobs and become even more efficient? Maybe because they are all actually smart enough to realize where the actual bullshit is in these claims.
>People always claim this, yet with ever increasing population, we continue to find work for people to do.
The reason I expect employment to eventually be much less than 50% is automation not population growth. In the past when one industry gets automated people move to another industry, but I don't see how that happens when/if we have human level AI.
Agreed. My understanding is that around the founding of the United States, something like half of the working population had jobs relating to producing food (farming, fishing, etc). Today it's something like 1%. As agriculture has gotten ridiculously efficient, that's freed up more of us to invent computers or vaccines or TikTok dance trends or whatever. Of course we still need truck drivers to deliver this abundance to our homes (something like 5-10% of the US working population, depending on whether you just count truckers, or Amazon drivers, or gig economy delivery folks, etc)...
But if we make it to a sci-fi future where robofarms produce foods with little involvement, robotrucks transport goods with little human involvement, housing is built by mobile 3D-printer-bots, using materials mined by robots, etc... it's easy to see where the basics could be so easily provided that it would seem (to me) morally repugnant not to provide them to everyone.
I don't believe we've reached a point where UBI makes sense, but it's interesting to me that even if we were in this sci-fi everything-is-plentiful-and-automated future, some folks still think only the people that happened to be born at the right time and into the right circumstances to own and/or operate these robots should reap the rewards. The unlucky who didn't happen to own shares of RoboInc or land one of the scarce jobs ought to subsist as a member of a wretched underclass?
> it's easy to see where the basics could be so easily provided that it would seem (to me) morally repugnant not to provide them to everyone.
Whilst I agree, the definition of basics keeps expanding in scope. Once it was food and water, then it was nutritious food and clean water, then we tack on shelter and medical care and electricity and internet and education and clothing and transport. So this point where we can easily provide the basics to everyone seems somewhat mythical. Our poorest people live in comparative luxury compared to the people of 500 years ago but we still call it poverty.
We can all agree that poverty and homelessness are a problem.
Where most of us disagree is on what should be done about it, and whether the problem is severe enough to warrant government action at all.
If more people are homeless when the economy is bad... fix the economy. If more people are jobless when the economy is bad fix the economy.
Saying "people are homeless, we have to fix homelessness" does not have a logical follow on that the way to fix it is to make everyone poor. It doesn't even follow that throwing money at the homeless would fix homelessness, especially when other prerequisites to having a home still fail to be met (like the ability to care for a home, or the self-control not to spend the money on things other than housing).
That doesn't mean don't try, but we need evidence and data to recommend policies not idealized fantasies of UBI.
The U in UBI stands for "Universal". The vast majority of the people can work.
Just like we don't let people who come to the Emergency Room die because they can't pay, we, as a society, can take care of the few people who, for reasons like mental health, or physical ailment, can't work.
I think you managed to fit multiple logical fallacies in a single sentence ... the person you're replying to is not suggesting they die, and there's solutions to the problem other than UBI, for example, what we already have .. social welfare programs for people that's can't work.
currently those that can't find work (even if they are capable) are getting social welfare.
all UBI is doing is that this welfare is given to everyone unconditionally. so the benefit does not go to those that can't find work but also to those that do find work. who then have the freedom to take breaks (when they have kids for example) because they are covered by UBI. and at the same time free up space for someone else who wants to work but can't find work.
> "You're gonna want something that other people make or do or do to you. If they're not your parents or lovers or partners, you better have something to give in exchange for that thing you want. Otherwise, why would they give it to you ? Making something others want is work."
This also has the benefit being true. The first version is jut false. Life doesn't require work. Life requires resources or the money to buy them. A lot of people are born with those resources or the money to buy them, and therefore don't need to work.
IMO, expecting something for nothing is somewhat immoral (except in cases where you don't have anything to give for reasons such as disability, age, and so on), but spending productive years clipping coupons or collecting dividends without contributing to society is pretty close to the root of all evil.
> This also has the benefit being true. The first version is jut false. Life doesn't require work. Life requires resources or the money to buy them. A lot of people are born with those resources or the money to buy them, and therefore don't need to work.
You didn't actually disprove that life requires work. Quite the opposite. You instead seem to be saying that society is structured in such a way that some people can live off the fruits of the labor of others. No one has access to any resources without someone having done work to create/acquire those resources.
> IMO, expecting something for nothing is somewhat immoral
I can definitely agree on this, though. I am generally against the notion of "positive rights". I have yet to see a good argument for why any should exist universally. I do believe in what I think is a related concept
of responsibilities. Parents, for instance, are responsible for the well-being of their own children. We can argue that society is responsible for its own poor and needy as well, but that is not the same as saying those people have a particular right to anything or that society can best fulfill its responsibilities through government programs like wealth redistribution or UBI.
"We can argue that society is responsible for its own poor and needy as well, but that is not the same as saying those people have a particular right to anything"
No. I don't think so. As an example: A starving person does not have an inherent right to food. On the other hand, if someone has enough to feed his own self, family and then some, one can argue he has a responsibility to assist others who do not have enough.
I do not see one to be the same as the other. Positive rights force other people to give you something. Responsibilities, on the other hand, direct you to give to others. Giving is not the same as taking.
Responsibilities are also hierarchical and some take precedence over others, and it is up to the person's discretion to decide how and when to fulfill them. Rights, on the other hand, are generally not seen as hierarchical but all-or-nothing. From https://www.unfpa.org/resources/human-rights-principles: "Consequently, all human rights have equal status, and cannot be positioned in a hierarchical order. Denial of one right invariably impedes enjoyment of other rights. Thus, the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living cannot be compromised at the expense of other rights, such as the right to health or the right to education."
I can say I probably agree with nothing from the above link, but it at least provides evidence that people do not view positive rights as either hierarchical or at the discretion of the giver.
I lastly think it can't be undervalued that giving viewed as a responsibility is more likely to inspire gratitude in the receiver, whereas taking viewed as a right tends to inculcate a demanding and ungrateful spirit in the taker.
"A starving person does not have an inherent right to food."
What kind of psychotic reasoning is this? Of course people have an inherent right to food.
I'm not a fan of positive rights either - when it comes to code (I avoid GPL stuff whenever possible). But we aren't all on this planet together so we can deny others food, that's just crazy.
You did a great job of misinterpreting what I said, but what I said is true and not even remotely psychotic. If anything, your reaction is a little crazy! I would like to note that you had no counterargument.
You surely don't have a right to food. You go out and get it yourself! I, on the other hand, have a moral responsibility to share my extra food with those who lack. I base my morality on my belief in God and what he expects of me. I am curious what you base your morality off of.
> But we aren't all on this planet together so we can deny others food
Speaking of psychotic, How did "I have a responsibility for the poor and needy" get converted in your head to "I am on this planet so I can deny food to others"?
"You go out and get it yourself!" - Except those who need food frequently can't. Children, the sick, the injured. We take care of these people and have a moral obligation to feed them because they have a right to food.
People absolutely have a right to food. A positive right, no less, that can't be denied.
People used to get it from "the commons" - since we've enclosed them all to shift to our current modes of...well, everything, we have to replace what people would have gotten from the commons previously and provide it free of charge, as a right to things on this earth that people would have had.
Like food. Currently what we do is burn the excess to keep the prices up. We've long since been able to make the food free; we don't and it is immoral (like a good number of our social constructs, imo).
No, no religion on my end. I just think it's obvious people have a right to food, like they have a right to clean air, water and shelter.
I am definitely not surprised. Atheists seem to be the loudest about proclaiming positive rights. And, yet, it is within atheist governments where people are least likely to experience these "rights", or even the right to life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_atheism
That is no accident.
> I just think it's obvious people have a right to food, like they have a right to clean air, water and shelter.
That's neat. I can't help but notice you declined to justify this belief. And that's part of the problem. Secular humanism has no foundation. Instead, it relies on the foundations Christianity built. As that erodes, so too will human flourishing in general!
No, you forget that a governed society has no right to exist. It only gains its legitimacy when it’s preferable to an ungoverned society and other achievable alternatives. In an ungoverned society, it’s rather trivial to build yourself a decent shelter and gather food (if you’re able-bodied).
What’s not possible in ungoverned society is gathering more resources than you can personally protect.
> No, you forget that a governed society has no right to exist.
I don't know that that is true or really what it's supposed to mean, so I'm going to challenge it.
> It only gains its legitimacy when it’s preferable to an ungoverned society and other achievable alternatives.
I have a feeling there's a lot of suppositions or beliefs one must have prior to making statements like these that I don't share.
> it’s rather trivial to build yourself a decent shelter and gather food (if you’re able-bodied).
Is it? I've watched a few episodes of "Alone" on Netflix and it sure doesn't look easy to me. Some seasons seem to devolve into "fattest man wins" because he starves last.
> What’s not possible in ungoverned society is gathering more resources than you can personally protect.
Why is that true? Could I not ask others to help me protect these resources? I don't need a government to do that.
> I have a feeling there's a lot of suppositions or beliefs one must have prior to making statements like these that I don't share.
Do you agree that you can choose to not follow the law? Would you also agree that if enough people chose to not follow the law, government would cease to exist?
> Is it? I've watched a few episodes of "Alone" on Netflix and it sure doesn't look easy to me. Some seasons seem to devolve into "fattest man wins" because he starves last.
Natural law doesn't really preclude you from cooperating, unlike reality shows. Also, in the natural world you generally migrate to places where resources are not scarce.
> Why is that true? Could I not ask others to help me protect these resources? I don't need a government to do that.
Why would they protect these resources rather than take them? Perhaps if you knew them personally and rewarded them generously, they'd do it, but then I'd say you're personally involved in protecting them. That doesn't scale to the extremes we have right now. There are no billionaire equivalents without government violence.
> Do you agree that you can choose to not follow the law?
Not only can you do not follow a law, but people in power do it successfully today. Immigration law is the obvious example. Those in power flout the law so blatantly that the law might as well not exist. Deportation virtually doesn't happen anymore. When there are no consequences for disobeying a law, it is the same as if the law didn't exist.
> Would you also agree that if enough people chose to not follow the law, government would cease to exist?
I think it might be better to word this as "enough people choose to rebel against their government." When that happens, there is usually some fighting that goes on and the government either wins or gets replaced. There is never a point with no government, however. The reason for this is because just about every government, no matter how tyrannical, is still preferable to anarchy.
> Natural law doesn't really preclude you from cooperating, unlike reality shows
> Why would they protect these resources rather than take them?
Probably for cooperative reasons! It doesn't matter, though. These are hypothetical situations that I don't think there is much value in considering. I'm totally in the "anarchy is so bad I'd prefer tyranny to it" camp.
By work I meant the formal arrangement by which goods and services and exchanged for a currency or bartered for other goods and services within the scope of the rule of law. In particular, I was replying to this quote:
>>> "You're gonna want something that other people make or do or do to you. If they're not your parents or lovers or partners, you better have something to give in exchange for that thing you want. Otherwise, why would they give it to you ? Making something others want is work."
With respect to my presumption; yes, I'm responding to the status quo, my point may not be universally true but it also is in no way hypothetical.
> expecting something for nothing is somewhat immoral
Note that this precise wording is likely to be used both by people who insist that you have no right to someone else's profits and by people who insist that you have no right to profit without working.
That's not responding at all to the argument in the article.
The argument is that civilization and property rights robbed individuals of a natural inheritance; a claim to richness of the natural world, an ability to sustain oneself without entering a patronage relationship.
It does not engage with whether anybody needs to make any effort for survival.
The authors argue that UBI is a way to compensate for this loss of rights.
>property rights robbed individuals of a natural inheritance
There was no such magical right. You have more right to land than animals, or worms, or the soil itself? When someone uses the words 'natural' or 'fair' or 'just' it is to invoke some emotional response, but generally has zero solid justification free from contradiction and conflicts.
Mankind made up the concept of 'natural rights' which feels good, but does not scale to populations of billions, limited actual resources, etc. Me being born does not give me rights to anything other than that which society has agreed to. If society has agreed that I work to provide my own way, so be it - it's the price I pay for the benefits of society.
You were born with zero, you actually have zero. Claiming rights to 'natural things' (which, by the same argument, actually were someone else's before you laid claim to them) is simply asking for the value of others to be handed to you for free.
This is essentially the difference between negative and positive rights. We can reasonably claim that everyone has certain natural rights such as freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and freedom of association. But merely existing doesn't give anyone the natural right to free housing, food, or healthcare.
If you exist and are able-bodied, you could build yourself a shelter and gather/kill your own food. The reason you can’t do that now is because of property rights.
Wrong. Even if there were no property rights, there simply isn't enough food for 8B people to survive through hunting and gathering. So unless we want to kill off 90% of the population then we need large-scale agriculture. And strong property rights are absolutely necessary in order to maximize agricultural productivity.
You can farm in the natural world as long as you can set up a system to protect your crops but also arguing about the precise amount of resources and agency afforded to you in the natural world is also missing some of the point.
By following social order, populations trade natural rights for the rights of their society. Collectively, the population can choose to stop doing that if they think they’re on the wrong end of the bargain. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be that they’re worse off, but that other parties receive much more of the surplus. This is how deals work in business and it’s the same thing here.
No, natural law is that which would exist without a government monopoly on violence. The only reason people can maintain property is because the government will protect it for them. Otherwise, a group of homeless people could easily band together and take your house.
Beating the state of the world under natural law is the lower bound for a legitimate government, and as automation increases, a capitalist system without UBI starts to lose to natural law and lose it’s legitimacy.
>No, natural law is that which would exist without a government monopoly on violence
Governments don't have a monopoly on violence. There's plenty of that without governments, even in civilized places. Governments help lower the incidence of violence by banding the people together against as much of the violence that not having a government allows.
And under your form of 'natural law', there is no law except that which you can take. You have no rights, only force.
Yes they do. Any violence not conducted or sanctioned by the government is illegal and is theoretically punished. When you say there exists violence with no government, you’re agreeing with me.
How about the people who have no home. Do they prefer governments and civilization? Would they not be better off if they could take your things?
Why do you assume that in order for a government to be legitimate, it must only satisfy you? I don’t really care about you or me or any one person. The question is whether the order we operate under is legitimate. In order for it to be legitimate, it must, at the very least, beat disorder for most people.
>Do they prefer governments and civilization? Would they not be better off if they could take your things?
Would they be better off if idiots could beat them without fear of police?
If they don't prefer civilization, why do they go where civilization exists? Why don't they wander off into some deep national forest land and build their own place?
Because they prefer civilization.
>Why do you assume
Why do you put assumptions in my writing that are not there? Need a strawman?
> In order for it to be legitimate, it must, at the very least, beat disorder for most people.
It does by the simple proof that most people don't just wander out of civilization and create chaos in some wasteland. In fact, only a tiny, tiny minority of people actually do that, so it must be working pretty well for nearly all people.
> Why don't they wander off into some deep national forest land and build their own place?
There’s really nowhere in the lower 48 that fits this description at this point. I’m currently living in MT, and there are plenty of people trying to make this work with trailers, tents, etc. They all get kicked out eventually and often their belongings get taken. If they were growing food, they lose access to it.
> Why do you put assumptions in my writing that are not there? Need a strawman?
You said “I prefer civilization”, implying it’s relevant to the conversation. If it’s not relevant, why say it?
> It does by the simple proof that most people don't just wander out of civilization
People are constantly trying to do this. They can’t without being disrupted by government forces. It’s possible there’s somewhere in the world where you could make a life for yourself without having police called on you, but it’s not easy to find, and the reason it’s uninhabited is probably because it lacks food, habitable weather etc.
>You said “I prefer civilization”, implying it’s relevant to the conversation. If it’s not relevant, why say it?
I did write that. Why did you then reply with "Why do you assume that in order for a government to be legitimate, it must only satisfy you? " which is not what I wrote? You needed a strawman.
If you want to read into what I actually wrote things you want me to have written, why bother any discussion? Just argue with yourself.
>There’s really nowhere in the lower 48 that fits this description at this point.
Nonsense. If they're going some place with a trailer, they are not remote at all. There's places in the Pahsimeroi area (near Salmon ID) where I've camped often a month at a time over the past 50 years (and my father did this since the 1960s) where you can go a month and not see a soul. In ALL the years I've done this, I've not one ran into a Ranger or law enforcement person.
1/10th of all the area of the US is BLM land, and lots of it is so remote that rangers NEVER go there. 240+ million acres. Lots of it so remote humans so rarely go there.
I have a lot of relatives in the MT and ID regions, so I get that a lot of people out there believe they want yo do this, but I've yet to meet one that will do it completely.
The problem with the people that want to live in a trailer (i.e., near civilization) or live in a tent (not really tenable long term) is they stay close to civilization, so they can access the fruits of civilization. If someone really wanted to be out for good, there's plenty of crazy remote area you can wander into.
And, if someone really wanted to be remote from society, there's plenty of Canada you can simply wander into, no problem (done that too).
Every so often someone comes out of the woods after 20-30 years remote and tells the story. So it's certainly doable. Most people want to think they're remote yet have the ability to access fruits of civilization, like medicine, food, gadgets. So again, they actually prefer civilization, or they could move out.
>People are constantly trying to do this.
Yes, out of 330,000,000 Americans, perhaps 1 in 10,000 do it. As I said - most people prefer civilization.
>They can’t without being disrupted by government forces.
Except for the plenty of people whose story gets reported rarely who actually did it, then gave up.
Another angle is: plenty of people own enough land out west to simply go into the center of their property and never return to civilization. How many do it? Pretty much none.
Because nearly all people prefer civilization.
When you write "People are constantly trying to do this" - what fraction do you think this is?
1/1000? 1/100,000?
It's so tiny that as I wrote: the vast majority of people prefer civilization, and those that do try what you write routinely return to civilization when they get sick, break an arm, face their first hard winter, or get old.
So - what fraction of people do you claim would prefer to live withdrawn from civilization?
> So - what fraction of people do you claim would prefer to live withdrawn from civilization?
I think there are a fair number of people that would be happy to start a new civilization (using civilization loosely here - a commune, whatever). Once this gets big enough, it's shut down by the government, particularly if members don't operate within US law.
There are plenty of things that you'd want to do to survive (clearing trees to farm, etc) that are illegal and would eventually land you in prison, even if you can get away with it for a month at a time. You're taking a very tight definition of being alone in nature, but there are other options that are not available to you including starting your own social order that are preferable to anyone who can't afford food and shelter.
This is probably getting too complicated to discuss over a text-based forum, and we also seem to be reiterating about 400 years of philosophy.
Governments definitely do have monopoly on violence. The armed forces, the prisons, the police force.. all of these are part of that monopoly. For a detailed study into government monopoly violence have a read of the global industrial complex.
You're really agreeing with everyone here. The "monopoly on violence" we're discussing comes in the context of a theoretical social contract[1], discussed by various philosophers. The social contract is a philosophical framework for deciding whether a government is legitimate or not. Under the contract, the government gets a monopoly on violence, and citizens get protection and support from the government. No one is suggesting that it's impossible to behead the king, just that this is not in the terms of the contract.
To refuse the social contract is to accept natural law (law without an organized government with a monopoly on violence). If too many people decide the social contract is not in their favor, they will do this by noncooperation or overthrowing the government. Under natural law, people are not prevented from building shelter, freely gathering food, etc. This is why people believe it is unjust and illegitimate to hold property rights above basic needs. Property (or at least more property than you can personally protect) is essentially a construction of the government, and freedom to gather and grow food is included in natural law. People who are deprived of important natural freedoms are likely to refuse the contract.
No, the "govt has a monopoly on violence" is repeated by the same people that don't read the entirety of links they post, and who use the word "literally" when it is not literally.
>No, the "govt has a monopoly on violence" is repeated by the same people that don't read the entirety of links they post, and who use the word "literally" when it is not literally.
Oh, you're one of those people. Rather than giving a substantive response, you're going to dismiss me because I used the word "literally" in a way not to your liking, despite the fact that the usage of "literally" to mean "figuratively" has been common in English idiomatic practice since at least the 1700s.
And as far as the monopoly on violence goes, by all means, if you're going to go through the effort to condescend to me, enlighten me as well.
Yes, I am aware of the history of literally. I am also aware that when you want to have a "substantive" response, then using hyperbole and claiming things have a definition that simply is not true is no way to have such responses.
If you read your link, including criticism, and realized that the phrase you hang your hat on is not at all where the field that coined it has evolved to over the past 100 years, you'd understand why arguing for antiquated ideas doesn't hold up well.
I find when someone clearly does not care to absorb new facts, and they jump to catch phrases and hyperbole, they don't care to learn, and often taunting them gets them mad enough to learn something, when simply presenting the ideas will not suffice.
You fall into that camp. If you want to present Weber's phrase as "literally the definition" of anything, spend some time reading criticisms and Weber's ideas and the evolution of mankind's thought on the topic.
And yet, if I go and shoot someone I get arrested, but if an executioner does, they’re not. Weird, I wonder why that is.
You’re absolutely avoiding the substance of the argument using the semantics of what the guy said, instead of addressing the point that the government decides who can and cannot commit violence and who is and is not subject to violence.
> you better have something to give in exchange for that thing you want.
Peace. That's what poor people stop giving once they feel too poor compared to non-poor. No, this is not a value statement, but an objective observation about human nature. I do not expect anyone to like it (I do not like it), but not accepting it as a fact is... delusional might be a proper word?
After you accept that it is good for you to keep poor not too poor, you likely start wondering how to be efficient about keeping the poor not too poor, and afger that you end up somewhere very close to UBI.
Thank you, someone had to mention it. Violence is part of natural law. The natural state of the world says you can’t hoard more resources than you can protect. Without a government monopoly on violence, billionaires get killed and their riches get plundered.
The argument kind of falls flat when we can't get Americans to go work on a farm to raise food for any thing. We have no reason to believe that poor urban people would/could flock to the Free land in the countryside and successfully start some sort of farming Utopia.
> you better have something to give in exchange for that thing you want.
Indeed. But I think the point of the article is that in addition to that, the actions of people have removed some of the options you would have otherwise had to acquire things. Or even more specifically, some valuable things have (for all practical purposes) a finite supply, and the amount of those things that gets distributed to you is not entirely (and in some cases not at all) dependent on your actions.
Author's assumption is that private property created poverty, and that hunter/gatherer societies were somehow more ideal than agrarian ones, which is nonsensical.
Poverty is the default state. It's there by default. Do nothing, have nothing. Do nothing as a hunter/gather, you're poor relative to your peers and you die.
Whatever cult UBI arises from is attempting to ameliorate the default by giving people something for nothing. Fine. That's honest.
The default state is 'all the land is being used to make food already'. That is the normal steady state in Europe throughout history. UBI is equivalent to the feudal aristocracy in getting paid based on land without doing any work. Except the aristocracy was expected to risk their lives on occasion.
That's not the point though, is it? The complaint above was that some people are getting paid without doing any work. Justifying this on the basis that 'they'll probably gamble it away' doesn't address the complaint at all.
In any case, it's a lot easier to seem industrious if you start out with a huge pile of cash than without. If you park it all in t-bills and live within the coupon income you won't earn any prizes but you won't suffer any real economic anxiety or accusations of impropriety either.
This may have been true in the past, when people tended to have lots of children. But with families having fewer children, it is probably less likely to be true in the future. Just as a personal example, I have 2 siblings and over 10 cousins. My daughter has 0 siblings and 1 cousin. Those numbers are going to go up by one or two but not much more than that as the window for kids is quickly closing. My family is solidly middle class, but it is entirely possible that that my daughters generation of the family ends up as "trust fund kids" simply due to the lack of dilution between siblings and cousins. Also, it helps that estate planning is significantly more accessible than it used to be.
Regardless, the OP was not necessarily talking about the generational wealthy, they quite literally said the "idle rich". And there will always be a fair number of those folks, regardless of whether it was multi-generational or not.
You are the one that took the thread off topic because you couldn't be bothered with basic reading comprehension.
> made enough money early in life that they could retire.
The OP was suggesting that previous aristocracy were occasionally asked to risk their lives, as if that was some sort of justification for their idleness. Nowhere do they make a distinction between aristocrats who "earned" their position vs aristocrats who inherited their position. So technically, proposing to "force the idle rich into some form of national service" (regardless of whether it was earned or inherited) is directly comparable to the OPs point about aristocrats.
> The default state is that there is land you can use to get your own food.
You have to do a lot of work to extract food from the land, which is in the point. If there was no economy, just you and a fertile wilderness, you'd need to work your ass off to survive. But more likely you'd die from eating a poisonous berry, starve, contract a fatal illness, or get eaten by a predator.
But if you try to do this now, there is a pretty decent chance thAt you will wind up in legal trouble because there's no conception of a free wilderness in modern law.
I'm responding only to the content of your previous comment, not commenting on UBI advocacy in general (on which I do not have a strong opinion at present).
I grew up in the Kimberley region of Western Australia alongside many people who still lived as traditional hunter gathers, in the 1980s I met and spoke with the Pintupi Nine (who had had no prior contact with "modern western culture") as I have some minor grasp of some western desert languages.
Regarding:
> If there was no economy, just you and a fertile wilderness, you'd need to work your ass off to survive.
Normally, Aboriginal groups were easily able to find enough food for their entire clan in three or four hours of hunting and gathering each day.
If you're in a fertile wilderness that you can read like a book and are familiar with then you need to go shopping for a few hours a day.
I have no idea where you got your "work your arse off" notion from - can you cite a source?
I'll concede that many people without a clue would spend a great deal of time thrashing about ineffectively wasting time and energy and then dying .. but we're talking about multi generational hunter gathers on the land they have occupied and shaped through land and plant management over 50+ thousand years.
It's not just trading control. You need to consider that hunters still needed to go out and hunt. Gatherers needed to gather. They built their own shelter, made their clothes, etc.
Curious, what is the minimum requirement for UBI? A pulse?
I think I was unclear. When I said "UBI in this form" I was talking about what the article advocates for modern times. People get to use land for their own purposes, but they have to pay the population.
The sinister euphemism of claiming that productive people have to "pay the population" manifests itself in weird ways, and it's not at all clear what you mean by that.
First of all, the most evil institutions that have existed over the last 120 years or so have been doing it in the name of "the people."
Secondly, if a government isn't both confiscating and redistributing the money, who are the group of robbers that you would designate doing this instead? UBI requires authoritarianism.
Sir, the Alaska fund is run by a government corporation governed by government employees and government appointees. The government decides how it's funded. The government decides how the money is spent. It's all government, and it's completely authoritarian because there's nothing voluntary about it.
I'm not sure how I can word this better. There's a difference between paying out the same amount to every person, versus picking specific things to put money into. I'm sure you can figure out what I mean.
> it's completely authoritarian because there's nothing voluntary about it
Yeah okay. It's exactly as authoritarian as every other tax. I thought you were using normal person language; I'm not going to argue semantics.
That sounds like property taxes, which already exist.
On the flip side, I wonder how much can be taxed? Is there a maximum? Currently, I work for the government through June.
Maybe I'm conflating UBI with increased taxes. The money has to come from somewhere, right? I'm in Southern California, where we enjoy some of the highest taxes and most expensive property in the world, so I'm a bit sensitive.
Also, he seems to correlate breathing air to being fed, which is wrong. There are plenty of places to get food for free, stuff that is about to expire gets donated. Just reach out to your local government or community college. It's a lot easier than hunting for it.
Last thing, here in California, about half the state is federal or state parkland and wilderness... The state itself blocks development and adds so much red tape to make housing much more expensive.
> That sounds like property taxes, which already exist.
Yes, the part about acquiring funds is the same as what we already do.
UBI is an additional way for funds to be distributed.
> On the flip side, I wonder how much can be taxed? Is there a maximum? Currently, I work for the government through June.
That depends so much on the details of the system.
People on the lower end will gain more UBI than taxes increase. People on the upper end will get less UBI than taxes increase. The tipping point could be anywhere in a large range.
One version of UBI is simply a system where your income tax starts at a negative amount of dollars.
The system we live now is no different. Especially in western countries, a lot if not most wealth is inherited wealth. Thus many people get something for nothing simply because we defined that something can belong to someone and that it can get inherited.
Or put another way, Prosperity and wealth are Abundance or surplus (more than what you need). Humans only create abundance through hard work and creativity.
That was surely true before civilization, private property, etc...
I'm open to new/creative ideas for how to build a society that guarantees everyone a "fair" shot at acquiring more abundance for themselves, if that's what they want. I'm sure there are better arguments for UBI, and it's unfortunate this terribly flawed one is getting so much attention.
To preface: UBI will not truly solve a problem until limitations are put on the extraction of economic rent. If everyone gets UBI then everyone will be expected to have UBI, so landlords (the original rent seekers when ignoring taxation) know that they can extract the UBI plus whatever they charged before. House sellers know that they can factor in the UBI into their selling price. Yeah, maybe some economic competition will limit how much of the UBI any given rentier or seller tries to extract, but you could easily end up in a situation where a person's multiple rentiers try extracting more than the UBI from them, putting them right back into the situation a UBI is supposed to prevent - not enough money to live on.
If UBI is going to exist without solving the problem of rent seeking it might be better to do it as multiple scrips or coupons, each good for only a particular thing (e.g. rent, food stamps, etcetera). This adds a layer of bureaucracy, but at least a person would be guaranteed a minimum amount of funds for each life necessity, instead of having it all taken by one thing.
And I know that this analysis of mine is missing quite a bit. E.g. Good Luck with implementing a UBI over the long-term, and for everyone.
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>"The thing is though, this isn't that far from what we actually did here on Earth centuries ago. Land used to exist without a monetary cost to access it. That was the natural way of things prior to the private property system and monetary system. We created poverty as we know it."
Taxation and indenturing existed before money. Taxes have previously included a certain amount of raw goods or labor. Even in non-agricultural tribal systems I assume people would be expected to contribute to the common weal as best they could.
>"It is a position not to be controverted, that the earth, in its natural uncultivated state, was, and ever would have continued to be, the COMMON PROPERTY OF THE HUMAN RACE. In that state every man would have been born to property."
I agree. But anyone who takes a look at squirrels or birds know that they fight over territory. Humans simply "civilized" the fight by attaching it to documents and currency.
>"If it's wrong to choke or starve someone to death unless they do what you want, then it's wrong to withhold air or food from someone unless they do what you want."
This is universally wrong. However taxes, and any other cost to living, is not forcing someone to do what you want. It's forcing someone to do something, anything which generates a cash income. It's an incentive to labor of some sort, though unfortunately, in our current system, it's also an incentive to become a rentier. The rentier is the problem, not the incentive to work. Though yes, no one should starve or be homeless, even if they can't labor.
>"Let's just recognize that Earth actually does belong to all of us, everyone in the present and future, and that those who own pieces of it, and who create things out of it, owe compensation to the rest of us for removing our access to what would otherwise have been common property."
I agree with the sentiment stated by Thomas Paine and this article. I just don't know that a universal UBI will be the way to do it. At least not without solving the rentier problem.
> Land used to exist without a monetary cost to access it. That was the natural way of things prior to the private property system and monetary system. We created poverty as we know it.
This is silly. First of all, only wealth can be created or destroyed, not poverty, which is the absence of wealth. My ape ancestor swinging from a tree without easy access to food, clothing, shelter or medicine is poorer than I am, full stop.
Second of all, there has never been a paradise where resources are communally owned without clear limitations on the use and distribution of those resources, usually at the behest of corrupt, tyrannical or murderous leaders.
Third of all, the existence of a monetary cost or private property is moot when it comes to defining ownership. An eagle doesn't use money or property laws to own his nest, but it's not like any other eagle can use it without cost.
Not to mention that access to land was fiercely defended by highly territorial tribes that fought wars of conquest and destruction against each other. This is not dissimilar to the behaviour of apes and large carnivores today.
Edit: To elaborate, "civilization" the way I see it has simply put the guardrails of due process around these things. We're still nakedly competing with each other, and in-groups are often bent on the destruction of out-groups. We just have laws and courts to make sure things don't get too far out of hand. It's peaceful coexistence not mass cooperation.
And yet it still proves my point, which is pretty much the same an TFA.
Defending a territory with your life might be stressful and I never claimed it's good life but it something any animal can do without having to go against some other animal that inherited vast land from their ancestor.
TFA is pretty clear and yes some people here are trying very hard not to see the point.
I like how your only analogies for different material conditions are those of animals.
“Things are better for me than they were before humankind literally existed” is such a hilariously meaningless thing to say. Why not go back further? Things are better now than they were before the earth’s surface cooled and formed a crust.
> Second of all, there has never been a paradise where resources are communally owned without clear limitations on the use and distribution of those resources, usually at the behest of corrupt, tyrannical or murderous leaders.
The article wasn't arguing that a paradise of communal resource sharing with out limitations has ever existed. It was arguing that property wasn't the limitation and that people had access to the basics they needed to survive. And there are many, many examples of societies that existed where resources were communally shared and every one had access to the things they needed. Many of which involved various methods of communal decision making as well.
This idea that humanity's state of nature is barbarous, brutal competition is an a historical myth that has been used to justify some of the worst abuses of the powerful.
Sure, there was conflict between societies. But again, this is an exaggerated view of just how much there was. I haven't seen many studies quantifying it. But given the sheer scale of damage conflicts today are capable of generating, I'm not sure that the total danger of conflict to any individual would have been that much greater to any individual then than now. I think we've definitely made gains in peace and security, but I also think those gains are frequently drastically exaggerated.
My point isn't that the past was some rose colored time. Only that false assumptions about human nature are frequently used justify deeply harmful policies and institutions. And that many people speak about how humans behaved in "that past" with very little actual anthropological or historical knowledge.
It’s a bit odd that you ignore the existence of The Commons is a long historic norm, and then turn around then dismiss The Commons as being privately owned, rather than collectively owned and operated.
This is an ahistorical understanding, that misinterprets economics, history, and sociology.
For a counterexample imagine you are born on a space station where it costs $1,000,000 per year to provide air for you. Should you have to a work a job to breath air?
The problem of universal basic income strategies is that they only work when the earth is far below its human population carrying capacity for the current technology level.
If we were at carrying capacity the idea would be ludicrous because you not working would result in one of us starving to death.
Pre-civilization there was a very strict limit on human populations based on the natural resources they could extract via labor. Anybody who didn't work starved in short order.
Universal basic income is basically inventing a new right to tax other people for your sustenance (much like feudal aristocrats) in times when we have food surpluses.
> If we were at carrying capacity the idea would be ludicrous because you not working would result in one of us starving to death.
That doesn't make sense to me.
You seem to think that if we hit carrying capacity, that means everyone is working full time to sustain that? Why?
Let's say all the farms in the world could sustain 100 billion people. Can't we run those farms with only 1 billion people? Why would non-workers cause starvation?
>Let's say all the farms in the world could sustain 100 billion people. Can't we run those farms with only 1 billion people? Why would non-workers cause starvation?
Why should the non-workers steal the surplus value created by those who work via taxation? Or is it only theft when filthy business owners do it via contractual agreements to trade labor for wages?
Why are you replying to me? That has nothing to do with what I was saying.
But I don't think either one of those is theft. I don't think the article was calling anything like that that theft either. It was complaining about how land ownership works.
If 1% of the population taking a day off would cause billions of people to starve why do you think you would have the option of not working?
You would starve because at carrying capacity nearly all of your income would go to food. There wouldn't be any slack.
Admittedly, you'd have to be one of the 'farmers' to have a non-marginal effect on food production.
Why would 1% of the population that creates all the food allow you to have 'free' stuff if them working 1% less meant millions of people would die? They could make you do anything.
A reasonable operation would have enough workers to cover sick days and the fact that people don't put in 100% every day. If they start running low on labor, they will hire more people.
And those nightmares of food supply shrinking by 1% are going to be there whether or not you have UBI. Like, I agree that we shouldn't get close to the planet's carrying capacity! That's not the subject at hand.
> The problem of universal basic income strategies is that they only work when the earth is far below its human population carrying capacity for the current technology level.
You are saying we can't have UBI because UBI is unsustainable. But our current system isn't sustainable either, and actually is putting us deeper into destruction year after year as we come up with new ways to extract more from the planet (and faster) and further pollute the planet.
If our current economic system was gradually pushing our technological level towards sustainability, then push on! But all evidence points to the opposite.
How does UBI make things more sustainable? UBI doesn't do anything to reduce the human population or create more underground oil reserves. All UBI does is replace bullshit jobs with welfare payments.
I don't think UBI is more sustainable. I'm saying UBI and our current capitalistic system are both unsustainable, and it seems to appear that capitalism is even more unsustainable as it continually invents new ways to extract more from the planet and faster. People want to consume more (ad infinitum), and capitalism aligns those desires with profit making creating a mechanism to achieve infinitely-growing consumption
Fertilizer supply has been seriously reduced in the last couple years due to supply chain failures and armed conflict. This is causing food security problems in much of the developing world.
> If we were at carrying capacity the idea would be ludicrous because you not working would result in one of us starving to death.
This is where it feels like your argument falls apart to me.
Suppose in 200 years the Earth is able to support a population of 10B humans, and has 10B humans occupying the earth. Suppose the labor to support those 10B humans is nearly entirely automated, such that we only need 100M people to work to reach the carrying capacity of earth.
You have an underlying assumption that each person's labor increases the carrying capacity of the overall population. That we're limited by the total production capacity of the human race, rather than the carrying capacity of the earth. And that was true in the past, but is less true in the present, and may become wildly disconnected in the future.
Inactive people require fewer calories (and other resources in general) than actively working people. If we were at carrying capacity then each person working would actually result in people starving to death.
If it costs $1,000,000 per year to provide air, and my full-time labor doesn't produce $1,000,000 worth of value, where does that leave me in your view?
> Pre-civilization there was a very strict limit on human populations based on the natural resources they could extract via labor. Anybody who didn't work starved in short order.
Labor is a product of civilization. Hunter-gatherer lifestyle was much less labor intensive than the agrarian lifestyle that followed. Instead of doing the hard work of making the land produce more than it naturally did, hunter-gatherers harvested whatever was naturally available.
In a sense, a hunter-gatherer tribe was like a pre-industrial army. Its size was primarily limited by the amount of food it could steal from the surrounding lands.
No, you shouldn't. The space station should have a plan to provide air to all its residents even if some portion of the people can't/won't work. Just like how our society should work even if some portion of the people can't/won't work. You'll never be able to have everyone working. Some people just aren't capable.
Our systems need to be designed with that in mind. And that's exactly what a UBI does. Redistributes a portion of the wealth that all of society creates back to everyone so that those who can't work won't die.
Even in a post scarcity society where we fully automated food production (as well as the production / continuous repair of all machines and systems that produce and distribute food -up the chain) this is not tenable.
What would motivate someone from going to medical school and busting their ass to help and care for lazy bums mooching off the free stuff from the government? They'd just want to stay in their free housing, enjoying the free food and entertainment too...
This utopia won't be possible until we produce self-sustainable machines that can execute all jobs that humans can today.
Meanwhile, there's a post on the front-page that talks about a huge shortage of electricians while the entirety of our society is hopelessly addicted to electrically-powered services.
What would motivate people? I think healthcare, as in your example, would actually see an influx of people motivated to help others.
Not everyone is lazy and would do nothing. Plenty of people work in healthcare today for less money than they would get paid in other industries primarily because they value helping others.
>What would motivate someone from going to medical school and busting their ass to help and care for lazy bums mooching off the free stuff from the government? They'd just want to stay in their free housing, enjoying the free food and entertainment too...
In all seriousness, it's possible right now in most developed countries to live off of welfare long-term, without working a day in your life.
And yet, most people don't want to do it. You're looked down upon, poor and the lack of a regular occupation basically breeds mental health issues.
I think a lot of people really overestimate the economic motivators, while down-playing the social/internal ones.
> What would motivate someone from going to medical school and busting their ass to help and care for lazy bums mooching off the free stuff from the government? They'd just want to stay in their free housing, enjoying the free food and entertainment too...
What motivates them today, when they could get a fast food job?
UBI isn't supposed to be cushy (with current technology), it's supposed to be minimal food and shelter.
By this logic volunteer work couldn't exist. The reality is that lots of people are capable and like helping other people, without necessarily wanting to make all their activity into an economic transaction.
Then again some people don't feel they are doing well unless they see someone else doing worse.
Can you build a viable society on volunteer work alone?
I'm sure there are a few (1:million) saints among us that just selflessly give their all, but why would anyone else take any shit from their boss or customers?
I like fantasies too but really consider it for a bit; most people volunteer at animal shelters to play with the cute puppies and kittens.
I asserted that it existed, not that it was the sole engine of economic growth. Why make such invalid inferences?
The fraction of people who volunteer by default is about 15%; ~20% pursue win-win economic outcomes, a similar portion are risk minimizers, and ~30% prefer a zero or negative-sum outcome as long as they come out on top. The remaining fraction don't adhere to any consistent pattern, whether due to stupidity or selectivity.
UBI in theory means that everyone in the world should receive a modest income (in the order of $2/day). This is something that I would support.
UBI proposals in practice means that an exclusive in-group gets gets the wages the comfortable middle class wages for free and outsource all their work to an out-group that doesn't qualify for UBI. Working conditions for the out-group are slow to improve because they have very little political power. Meanwhile, the in-group stagnates and becomes completely dependent foreign work paid for by free money. This is exactly is what happens in the Gulf oil nations.
What do you expect someone living in America to do with $2 a day ??
UBI doen't have to be global, though ideally it would be,
it can have a huge good for people working in exploitive jobs or doing make-work, freeing them to contribute and volunteer as they see fit. But only if it's enough to actually live on
> Imagine it were actually possible for one person to own a machine that sucked up all the oxygen in our atmosphere, and that the air we need to breathe to live was then sold to us in cans of Perri-Air like in Spaceballs.
I don't have to imagine anything because I live in area engulfed by smog every winter. I literally have to pay to breathe fresh air (from a filter). What's worse the ones responsible for this just want to not have to suffer the cold.
It sucks, it truly does.
> but it's a common occurrence to tell people going hungry that they should just get a job to buy food.
Unrelated: how often do people actually go hungry in the US? I thought homelessness is a much more immediate problem when you're out of money.
Yep, this is a pretty glaring flaw of any ideology that tries to reduce ethics to property. Any such ideology is using a sleight of hand by pretending as if property is a simpler or more fundamental notion than ethics. Any time you hear an argument like "you should be able to do whatever you want as long as you're not aggressing against another person or their property" you should ask them whether they think all possible distributions of property are equally ethical.
Such arguments remind me of this[0] classic note from Douglas Adams.
“These politicians, eh? They’re so stupid! Why don’t they just make essential goods free? After all, we were better off as hunter gatherers! Also Spaceballs lol amirite?”
I say this as someone who supports some aspects of land reform and UBI. These sophomoric snipes at “conservatives” are just echo-chamber noise.
I think the most important point that the author makes is not whether property and the earth are common goods or not, it's simply that there's enough food for everyone.
There's enough food to keep everyone well fed. There's enough homes to keep everyone housed and safe. There's enough health care resources to keep most people reasonably healthy.
But we choose that some should starve, some should be homeless, and some should die prematurely because it allows some others to live a slightly more decadent lifestyle. Some, an obscenely lavish lifestyle. And yes, it is a choice we make as a society.
I'm not advocated for communism. We don't need a Gini Coefficient of 1. But maybe we could take some steps in the direction of sharing a bit more rather than continuing to rush in the other direction, and claiming that it's the fault of the poor that they aren't wealthy.
UBI isn't impossible or unreasonable. It just would mean that some folks- and probably a lot of the people on HN given software developer compensation lately- would need to do with a slightly less decadent lifestyle.
I'm against UBI, though I'm for easier access to food stamps in the US for anyone who wants them.
Since the end of WW2, we've torn down at least a million SROs* in the US and not really replaced them with anything comparable. In their absdnce, people have turned to living in RVs, the Tiny House movement has been born and there are too many chronic homeless, many of whom eventually end up in California which seems to take the heat for the failed policies of an entire nation.
The Tiny House movement began as an idea for how to live with less and when it ran up against the fact that it's not legal to build a house that small, rather than fight city hall, they slapped wheels on them as a hack to get around the rules.
The reality is that the US has made it illegal to build a lot of the housing that we once had in abundance and which worked well: small residential spaces in walkable, mixed use neighborhoods where life without car ownership was quite feasible and even the norm.
Cars have only been in vogue for around a hundred years. In that short time, we've whored out our urban planning processes to the worship of the car and we tell anyone for whom that doesn't work for any reason to quit their bitching and stop bothering people. If you can't drive for any reason, you are a second class citizen and how dare you get all uppity and act like you should have some reasonable quality of life without needing to either be able to drive or so rich you can hire a chauffeur to do it for you.
UBI won't fix our problems anymore than student loans fixed our problems. Student loans didn't level the playing field for the less privileged. It made them slaves to paying their debts, often while unable to get the kind of good job their degree supposedly guaranteed them.
Throwing money at this problem won't fix it. UBI won't buy poor people a basic, decent life. The kinds of goods and services needed to provide such largely do not exist in much of America and it's a fevered pitch uphill battle to try to establish any of them in far too many cases.
Why would UBI be like a loan, when there is no expectation that it will be paid back? I support it instead of food stamps because it's simpler to understand and more general, but otherwise does the same thing without onerous reporting and beurocracy
Student loans didn't magically improve quality of life for degree seekers. Instead, it lined the pockets of universities while creating new problems for underprivileged students who took loans.
UBI won't magically create inexpensive housing where you can reasonably live without a car. Most likely, it just causes landlords to jack up rent and get richer while doing liitle or nothing for the poorest of the poor.
> Student loans didn't magically improve quality of life for degree seekers. Instead, it lined the pockets of universities while creating new problems for underprivileged students who took loans.
Citation needed here, massively! At least in Australia, university was something only rich kids did back before free education and HECS.
I really think the anti-student-loan argument is a red herring. Medical costs have gone up almost the same amount in the same time period without student loans.
The poorest will be much richer because you've given them money, almost by definition.
Student loans are problematic because they put the student in lifelong debt, before that state schools were just, state subsidized and students were given scholarships, both of which are much closer to UBI. And even so, they're still better than nothing imo, though free-school-for-all Germany style would be better still.
I share your worry about landlords jacking up prices. In a "free market" you'd expect them to compete on price but obviously that isn't the case since they have all the power and are able to set their prices as high as the renters are able to pay. That's a problem and would affect people on UBI, but could be solved by additional regulation as well, which essentially every UBI supporter is in favor of.
That's a lot of the advantage of UBI in my opinion - is that it's much easier to access than the complicated welfare systems we have now, which require meeting up and consulting with lots of volunteer specialists to be sure you're doing it the right way.
I agree that getting benefits to people without an ID is a problem, but it seems very tangential to the UBI vs Status Quo debate.
People are generally stuck in a shell they call reality, which are actually just stories they tell themselves to make some sense and rules people made up in the past that they grew up with. If UBI goes against some view you understand as reality, then of course you'll say "how dare they think of that". There is talk of property in the other comments here, and a funny thought here: not so long ago, it was entirely normal to own property in the form of other people. Now it's completely not normal because you can't actually own a human being as the reality is that we want all people to be created equal. But at the time, it was normal and if you would question that a slave owner would probably say "how dare you, I paid for these slaves, I own them". But then we reached a higher level as a civilization.
As far as UBI is concerned, I'm just sceptical that it will transform the system. More likely it will be just absorbed by the system, e.g. my rent will just get more expensive and I will not actually be able to work less. Not saying I think it can never work, but I am not sure.
^ Might be the only good skeptical of UBI take in the whole thread.
I share your worries, it does seem like it will have to be in some way tied to cost-of-living. Done right, where you can actually have the honest threat of being able to quit your job without worries, I think it would give a lot of leverage to workers.
It would be an absolute game changer imo. So much of the ills on a individual, family, and society level can be traced back to all adults needing to spend the majority of their life working jobs they most often don’t like, and then not having any time or energy for anything else.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] threadI can go foraging / hunting right now and find food, not enough to live off, but in a time before land ownership and mass population explosions, there would have been enough... Which... is the entire point of the article. So are you arguing for the premise of the article then?
In some sense most of our very lives are due to the systems the author believes makes us "a planet full of assholes".
We live in an era where for most people if the government runs out of foreign exchange you end up with a famine.
That's certainly not true in the sense that modern agriculture allows for population densities that foraging/hunting lifestyles couldn't even dream of supporting. Also, tribes were very territorial about land and fought over it frequently. And people of the time were far more susceptible to changes in the environment: https://qr.ae/pr2Ah3https://qr.ae/pr2Ah3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQxEuXM_0eY&t=110s North American tribes were much smaller in number because they could support far less people per square mile. The Cherokee tribe, one of the largest east of the Mississippi, for instance, numbered around 20,000 in 1690, a paltry number compared to the size of the Aztecs or Maya, which numbered in the millions.
From the article: The thing is though, this isn't that far from what we actually did here on Earth centuries ago. Land used to exist without a monetary cost to access it. That was the natural way of things prior to the private property system and monetary system. We created poverty as we know it
this has to be the most disingenuous take on poverty I've ever heard. Most of human existence has been a struggle just to not die of hunger or exposure to the elements. Poverty in western nations today is worlds apart from that.
Also, from the article: We all would have inherited land, or at least free access to it, but in the process of creating civilization as we know it, we became dispossessed of our natural inheritance
Our natural inheritance is subsistence living amidst the constant threat of war, conquest, slavery, and the capricious whims of mother nature and lady fortune. Basically, the strongest survive and might makes right.
All land / resources were staked out by small tribes of humans who might kill you for using it?
Small tribes of humans defending hunting/foraging grounds is a state of pre-civilization. Life required work then too, and things were worse. His premise is that things used to be better and we've made it worse. Hard disagree.
Do you think the risk of death from other tribes is inextricably tied to community-owned land?
Or, you couldn't do anything to access certain land, because the people who controlled it thought you said shibboleth the wrong way and would kill you if you tried to use that land.
Yeah, the "natural way" of things was that you and your tribe fought off and killed competing tribes trying to access your resources. This isn't particularly desirable, which is why monopolization of violence by larger entities was established.
What are you even arguing against? The post isn't anti-government, and it's not advocating we go back to those times.
Most contemporary evidence on hunter gatherer societies indicates the opposite: it was highly violent with intense competition between groups.
No, that's an enormous strawman. It's saying one particular thing was better.
I reject the Hobbesian premise that other social forms should be dismissed as nasty, brutish, and short, and it's not for lack of familiarity with the anthropology of prehistorical conflict.
[citation needed]
You really think that contemporary Pygmies of the Congo, the uncontacted people of the Amazon, the 19th century Australian Aborigines, Cheyenne, Inuit, and Shawnee, along with the prehistoric of Central Europe and East Asia, are culturally indistinguishable beyond silly hats?
This is laughable.
Of course they have different languages, religious practices, etc. But that's not particularly important relative to the point I'm making: none of the societies you listed were examples of the idyllic noble-savage kind of society that popular culture tends to portray hunter gatherers to be.
Literally no one is making that point. What people (or at least I am) saying is believing all hunter gatherer societies are dominated strong man violence is pure fantasy that is informed by they’re own biases and wishes rather than actual data.
I disagree. It's stressful and dangerous, to be sure, but monopolization of violence by larger entities is fundamentally totalitarian. If I'm outnumbered and outfought by you, I have other strategic options. Under a state, merely expressing opposition to the way things are can be a criminal offense.
How about:
"You're gonna want something that other people make or do or do to you. If they're not your parents or lovers or partners, you better have something to give in exchange for that thing you want. Otherwise, why would they give it to you ? Making something others want is work."
Also, the following statement is based on a false premise: “ Let's just recognize that Earth actually does belong to all of us, everyone in the present and future, and that those who own pieces of it, and who create things out of it, owe compensation to the rest of us for removing our access to what would otherwise have been common property.”
This implies that creation itself is some kind of theft. The actual theft is taking something from a creative, productive person and giving it to an idle one.
At least that's the economic theory. If we were to raise taxes on dividends, no one can really predict how much that would reduce the long-term economic growth rate.
Is short-term investment that much less useful than long-term? Especially when the stock market is so big and smooths out short-term investments so much? We're effectively paying a lot of money for that bias, and I'm not convinced that's better than a tiny bias or no bias.
I could certainly be persuaded by that and maybe about short vs long term investment. Do we have data from other markets to compare?
Above I'm just explaining the reasoning behind the status quo. Reaction to that seems negative. I can't tell if I'm wrong about the reasoning, or people are signaling that the reasoning is wrong.
For example, consider the 10% federal luxury tax imposed in 1991 to reduce the budget deficit. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it devastated several domestic manufacturing industries and destroyed many jobs. Whoops.
At this point, I think the system has failed.
Buying stock is investing cash into a business. The investment has more risk of going down in value compared to cash in the bank. Government created a tax advantage to partially offset the risk, and thus encourage investment. This tends to move capital to places it can be used for creating new things, instead of sitting in a vault.
No it doesn't. Helping yourself to resources and then asserting property rights thereon to prevent others from doing the same is a kind of theft.
It's how national borders work.
It's how national borders work.
A distinct negative, as far as I am concerned. Passports only became a thing around World War 1. Artificial restrictions on movement by labor is a massive economic distortion that essentially treats labor as a captive resource by mutual agreement between states. Would-be economic migrants whose goal is to work are equated with marauding armies.
Get rid of welfare states, and you can get rid of borders. But you can't maintain a welfare state with generous welfare subsidies and have open borders.
Thanks for your reply.
"Productive" - we have people making livings selling farts in jars, but we value a stay at home parent at $0. Clearly we're abusing the word "productive".
One example, intellectual property constraints are perpetually expanding due to an increasing number of patents, copyrights and trademarks. If you are a creative person, you are legally required to navigate this intellectual property minefield in order to make a living. Why shouldn't you get some sort of token compensation for the loss of creative rights?
Another example, I like to fish. But I am required by government regulation to pay for a permit and to limit my fishing activity to comply with regulations. The regulations are burdensome enough where it would be prohibitive to sustain my family solely on my fishing labor. This was not the case about a hundred years ago (roughly). One could sustain a family through fishing alone. I could try and go the commercial route, but that requires an investment of upwards of $100k and that industry is notoriously hostile to new entrants and extremely volatile (read up on snow crabs for example). So for all intents and purposes, this natural resource is no longer available to me to use as a primary source of sustenance. Why shouldn't I expect some sort of compensation for that?
And of course the big one, land rights. We give landowners perpetual rights to use a piece a land as long as they pay their taxes and comply with local zoning regulations. That land is not theirs. It existed long before they were born, and will continue to exist long after they are gone. But while they "own" that land, I am forbidden from using it. And there are fewer and fewer places in the world where land is free/cheap, and also somewhat economically useful. At some point in the future (if not already) we should expect that type of land to disappear entirely as capitalism continues gobble up all available opportunities. UBI feels like a natural way to compensate individuals for the loss of rights to this land.
Historically, citizens of modern well functioning democracies have considered the right to vote as sufficient "compensation" for the loss of certain natural rights. The right to vote is certainly a powerful and necessary right. But I think UBI is a more natural compensation for the increasing economic constraints that modern society imposes on its citizens. Fishing regulations help prevent fish stocks from collapsing, intellectual property rights allow creators to profit from their work, etc..., but these restrictions also narrow the legal space in which current and future citizens can make a living. Do we really need more and more people releasing shit coins and NFTs in order to squeak out a living? Do we really need more people optimizing facebook ad conversions? Maybe we just acknowledge that the vast majority of work being done in modern societies is not essential, and forcing more people to compete in that landscape is not making the world a better place. A small UBI isn't going to dramatically change peoples motivations. Freeloaders already find ways to skate by, UBI might make it a little easier. But maybe it is better if the freeloaders just take their UBI and chill rather than try their hand at another scammy NFT project. Even with UBI, the vast majority of people will continue to work as UBI would be too small to provide a comfortable middle class lifestyle. Maybe a few people might downshift a little bit and use UBI as an opportunity to focus on things that they consider important, i.e. family, hobbies, volunteer work, etc.. But is that really so bad?
Should half the population starve in such a society?
or a different model, if 1% need to work 40 years to sustain us, then 10% can do the same while working only 4 years, or everyone only works one year. (ok, it doesn't scale like that because it takes more time to get experience for certain tasks, but even then, with such an abundance of available labor, every worker can spend half of their work time to teach others about their work)
all it takes is an understanding that the best thing to do with those not needed for work is to educate them to do something else that is useful for us.
A job doesn't entitle you to power.
If they think they are underpaid, they can ask for more money.
If the wages of that sector go up a lot, watch as half the world applies for those jobs.
It's not specifically what was written, but it's what I see between the lines.
And if 99% of the population is too dumb to do it, then it probably doesn't need to be done.
This is very hard to believe. That's basically conceding that we will never cure cancer/colonize mars/solve productive nuclear fusion etc.
The country with the highest percentage of PhDs is Slovenia, at 3.8% of 25-64 year-olds.
I know academic performance doesn't perfectly equate to IQ, especially at this level because right now smart people have many other options, but on the other hand that's the highest percentage and the OECD average is just short of 1.1%.
OECD PhD percentages: https://doi.org/10.1787/888933978645
China I'm not sure about, but seems to be about 500k/year, so if I estimate population of 1.5e9 and 80 year life expectancy, that's a steady-state level of 3.75% of the entire population.
So the minimum for those things being above IQ 125 seems at least plausible. May not be correct, but it is plausible.
As for "why should they get significant power?" — well, 'should' is a question of values. Do you believe in democracy and self-determination? Or is it fine to treat them all like animals, by which I mean spay, neuter, euthanise without asking their opinions, and/or selectively breed to be decorative and fit into handbags? Because the worst horrors that Charlie Stross and Ian Banks and Harlan Ellison have imagined are all as easy as Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism if you have an AI which can automate almost everything, regardless of whether anything remains purely in the domain of a tiny elite.
I'm going to support democracy. That's why I think an unemployable 99% should have, in a reasonable sense, 99% of the power.
As for why the 1% may have much more than 1% of the power in practice… that's kinda where I was going with the Hyper-Dystopia vs. Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism example: whoever controls the AI gets to play as Gods to a much larger degree than mere billionaires get to act like real life is a Civilization/KSP/SimCity game, and the default for who controls the AI is whoever has skills such that they can't be replaced with an AI. Or the current rich, if everyone can be displaced by AI.
Imagine there was an AI which was normal compared to a human mind — as in, you can reasonably assign it an IQ score the same way you would a biological human, and the score wouldn't be biased by it doing the maths and memory puzzles a million times faster even as it fails a simple word game or is unable to either count or subitize a small number of objects in an image.
IQ scores are normally only valid in the "+/- 2 standard deviations" range, which by definition is IQ 70 to 130.
(IQ tests are just a direct mapping onto standard deviations, not at all a linear scale, so while I'm very impressed with ChatGPT, I don't know if it would always outperform an IQ 70 human or not, even though it can definitely sometimes outperform IQ 130 human).
Assume this AI's electricity bill is equal to Example Everyperson's wages.
If the AI has an IQ of 70, then 2.3% of the population are permanently uneconomical through no fault of their own; 85, then 15.9%; 100, then 50%; 115, then 84.9%, 130, then 97.7%.
What is the likely IQ of the first human-like AI whose electricity cost matches an average salary? And how fast is it likely to go up?
~~~~
From the other direction: I don't know for sure how much ChatGPT costs to run, though I think it's in the order of cents per response. What I do have is an upper bound for Stable Diffusion of $0.0001 per image, less than half of the $0.00022 it takes to keep a human (on the $1.90 per day UN abject poverty threshold) alive for 10 seconds to type in the prompt[0].
I don't know what the future of AI will be, but I suspect that it will be so cheap that that won't need to be a superior intelligence to all humans in all domains, to cause literally all humans in all domains to be uneconomical.
[0] https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/10/09/an-end-to-c...
The military found that people with lower scores were not even up to correctly sweeping the floors consistently.
The actual test is not an IQ test but the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, which has rough equivalents to IQ scoring.
and the things that people actually value (lots of creative ventures) tend to be greatly undervalued to the point its hard to support ones self unless your and elite few
People always claim this, yet with ever increasing population, we continue to find work for people to do. Who would have guessed when the Earth's population was 1 million people that'd we eventually have billions of jobs.
So there is really no reason for there to not be enough work to do. If each person consumes enough in life to equal once person's work output, then every additional person will work enough to get enough to consume for themselves by trading with others.
As long as people can trade the result of their effort for the efforts of others, there is no reason we will ever run out of jobs. In fact, there's likely now and always will be things we could do except we simply don't have enough workers to do it. Each big technological change in the past freed workers from previous drudgery and opened up large swaths of working people to provide labor for the next wave of innovation. There's no need innovation ever ends.
This scaling has always worked, from societies of a few people to countries with a billion people. And there's no shortage of work still to be done.
Ah yes thank god we have more paper pushers in hospitals than doctors. Otherwise who would push the paper?
It's the modern equivalent of tribespeople throwing rocks at the moon.
A good place to learn in life is when you don't understand why something exists or how it works, instead of immediately writing it off with intellectually lazy hatred and dismissiveness, spend some time understanding what came before, what problems the current solution solves, and why things are as they are. You'll be amazed and the nuance and insights generations of clever people solving problems have passed on for situations you currently don't see or understand.
You'll end up happier and have a better understanding of the world.
https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/06/29/bullshit-jo...
And a large amount of people believing a thing are not the same thing as truth, as evidenced by countless mass misconceptions from the trivial to the insane.
The problem with ideas like this, just like any number of wild ideas, is that they're easier to manufacture than accurate explanations, so there's more of them, and people with itchy brains love to latch onto them, but they pass by over and over without people actually realizing they're all the same nonsense - wishful simple explanations for complex phenomena.
And then people regurgitate it over and over on the internet because it sounds nice to them, but they cannot be bothered to see what follow-up actual scholars did to debunk it.
For example, if all these jobs are bullshit, then start a company with none of them, and crush all the others since they're wasting sooooo much time and money and resources...
But that has happened exactly zero times. And will happen zero times more. Care to explain why short of invoking massive Illuminati world conspiracy nonsense?
I believe reality.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067
Awesome to see a person in real life who thinks all markets are perfectly competitive and that there’s no such thing as anticompetitive behavior or fixed costs.
Awesome to see a person in real life given the chance to jump on a land mine just do it full heartedly :)
This is precisely why I asked "Care to explain why short of invoking massive Illuminati world conspiracy nonsense?".
And you jumped right in on cue.
None of your excuses stop thousands of companies from starting and succeeding every year. Yet none have removed the bullshit jobs claimed, making them even better, more efficient companies.
So your bogeymen are pulled out by you to justify a worldview mismatched from reality to sustain the belief (discredited as I pointed out above by ample academic empirical research) that so many jobs are bullshit, despite such easy evidence to the contrary, and, like all conspiracy Illuminati beliefs, self contradictory with even the evidence that companies start all the time.
Congrats.
It's easy to start a company - there are literally millions of them in the US, with thousands starting weekly. Nearly all have fixed costs, face the same marketplaces, and yet every year 100's of them get so big they float public IPOs. Most of the Forbes 400 richest people are first gen company founders, facing all your bogeymen that, I guess by your logic, would make it impossible to make successful companies.
So why are none of them smart enough to remove all these bullshit jobs and become even more efficient? Maybe because they are all actually smart enough to realize where the actual bullshit is in these claims.
The reason I expect employment to eventually be much less than 50% is automation not population growth. In the past when one industry gets automated people move to another industry, but I don't see how that happens when/if we have human level AI.
But if we make it to a sci-fi future where robofarms produce foods with little involvement, robotrucks transport goods with little human involvement, housing is built by mobile 3D-printer-bots, using materials mined by robots, etc... it's easy to see where the basics could be so easily provided that it would seem (to me) morally repugnant not to provide them to everyone.
I don't believe we've reached a point where UBI makes sense, but it's interesting to me that even if we were in this sci-fi everything-is-plentiful-and-automated future, some folks still think only the people that happened to be born at the right time and into the right circumstances to own and/or operate these robots should reap the rewards. The unlucky who didn't happen to own shares of RoboInc or land one of the scarce jobs ought to subsist as a member of a wretched underclass?
Whilst I agree, the definition of basics keeps expanding in scope. Once it was food and water, then it was nutritious food and clean water, then we tack on shelter and medical care and electricity and internet and education and clothing and transport. So this point where we can easily provide the basics to everyone seems somewhat mythical. Our poorest people live in comparative luxury compared to the people of 500 years ago but we still call it poverty.
Where most of us disagree is on what should be done about it, and whether the problem is severe enough to warrant government action at all.
If more people are homeless when the economy is bad... fix the economy. If more people are jobless when the economy is bad fix the economy.
Saying "people are homeless, we have to fix homelessness" does not have a logical follow on that the way to fix it is to make everyone poor. It doesn't even follow that throwing money at the homeless would fix homelessness, especially when other prerequisites to having a home still fail to be met (like the ability to care for a home, or the self-control not to spend the money on things other than housing).
That doesn't mean don't try, but we need evidence and data to recommend policies not idealized fantasies of UBI.
Just like we don't let people who come to the Emergency Room die because they can't pay, we, as a society, can take care of the few people who, for reasons like mental health, or physical ailment, can't work.
Not all of them of course - we have social systems. But those are far from a silver bullet.
currently those that can't find work (even if they are capable) are getting social welfare.
all UBI is doing is that this welfare is given to everyone unconditionally. so the benefit does not go to those that can't find work but also to those that do find work. who then have the freedom to take breaks (when they have kids for example) because they are covered by UBI. and at the same time free up space for someone else who wants to work but can't find work.
This also has the benefit being true. The first version is jut false. Life doesn't require work. Life requires resources or the money to buy them. A lot of people are born with those resources or the money to buy them, and therefore don't need to work.
IMO, expecting something for nothing is somewhat immoral (except in cases where you don't have anything to give for reasons such as disability, age, and so on), but spending productive years clipping coupons or collecting dividends without contributing to society is pretty close to the root of all evil.
You didn't actually disprove that life requires work. Quite the opposite. You instead seem to be saying that society is structured in such a way that some people can live off the fruits of the labor of others. No one has access to any resources without someone having done work to create/acquire those resources.
> IMO, expecting something for nothing is somewhat immoral
I can definitely agree on this, though. I am generally against the notion of "positive rights". I have yet to see a good argument for why any should exist universally. I do believe in what I think is a related concept of responsibilities. Parents, for instance, are responsible for the well-being of their own children. We can argue that society is responsible for its own poor and needy as well, but that is not the same as saying those people have a particular right to anything or that society can best fulfill its responsibilities through government programs like wealth redistribution or UBI.
That's exactly what it means, though...
No. I don't think so. As an example: A starving person does not have an inherent right to food. On the other hand, if someone has enough to feed his own self, family and then some, one can argue he has a responsibility to assist others who do not have enough.
I do not see one to be the same as the other. Positive rights force other people to give you something. Responsibilities, on the other hand, direct you to give to others. Giving is not the same as taking.
Responsibilities are also hierarchical and some take precedence over others, and it is up to the person's discretion to decide how and when to fulfill them. Rights, on the other hand, are generally not seen as hierarchical but all-or-nothing. From https://www.unfpa.org/resources/human-rights-principles: "Consequently, all human rights have equal status, and cannot be positioned in a hierarchical order. Denial of one right invariably impedes enjoyment of other rights. Thus, the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living cannot be compromised at the expense of other rights, such as the right to health or the right to education."
I can say I probably agree with nothing from the above link, but it at least provides evidence that people do not view positive rights as either hierarchical or at the discretion of the giver.
I lastly think it can't be undervalued that giving viewed as a responsibility is more likely to inspire gratitude in the receiver, whereas taking viewed as a right tends to inculcate a demanding and ungrateful spirit in the taker.
What kind of psychotic reasoning is this? Of course people have an inherent right to food.
I'm not a fan of positive rights either - when it comes to code (I avoid GPL stuff whenever possible). But we aren't all on this planet together so we can deny others food, that's just crazy.
You surely don't have a right to food. You go out and get it yourself! I, on the other hand, have a moral responsibility to share my extra food with those who lack. I base my morality on my belief in God and what he expects of me. I am curious what you base your morality off of.
> But we aren't all on this planet together so we can deny others food
Speaking of psychotic, How did "I have a responsibility for the poor and needy" get converted in your head to "I am on this planet so I can deny food to others"?
People absolutely have a right to food. A positive right, no less, that can't be denied.
People used to get it from "the commons" - since we've enclosed them all to shift to our current modes of...well, everything, we have to replace what people would have gotten from the commons previously and provide it free of charge, as a right to things on this earth that people would have had.
Like food. Currently what we do is burn the excess to keep the prices up. We've long since been able to make the food free; we don't and it is immoral (like a good number of our social constructs, imo).
No, no religion on my end. I just think it's obvious people have a right to food, like they have a right to clean air, water and shelter.
I am definitely not surprised. Atheists seem to be the loudest about proclaiming positive rights. And, yet, it is within atheist governments where people are least likely to experience these "rights", or even the right to life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_atheism
That is no accident.
> I just think it's obvious people have a right to food, like they have a right to clean air, water and shelter.
That's neat. I can't help but notice you declined to justify this belief. And that's part of the problem. Secular humanism has no foundation. Instead, it relies on the foundations Christianity built. As that erodes, so too will human flourishing in general!
What’s not possible in ungoverned society is gathering more resources than you can personally protect.
I don't know that that is true or really what it's supposed to mean, so I'm going to challenge it.
> It only gains its legitimacy when it’s preferable to an ungoverned society and other achievable alternatives.
I have a feeling there's a lot of suppositions or beliefs one must have prior to making statements like these that I don't share.
> it’s rather trivial to build yourself a decent shelter and gather food (if you’re able-bodied).
Is it? I've watched a few episodes of "Alone" on Netflix and it sure doesn't look easy to me. Some seasons seem to devolve into "fattest man wins" because he starves last.
> What’s not possible in ungoverned society is gathering more resources than you can personally protect.
Why is that true? Could I not ask others to help me protect these resources? I don't need a government to do that.
Do you agree that you can choose to not follow the law? Would you also agree that if enough people chose to not follow the law, government would cease to exist?
> Is it? I've watched a few episodes of "Alone" on Netflix and it sure doesn't look easy to me. Some seasons seem to devolve into "fattest man wins" because he starves last.
Natural law doesn't really preclude you from cooperating, unlike reality shows. Also, in the natural world you generally migrate to places where resources are not scarce.
> Why is that true? Could I not ask others to help me protect these resources? I don't need a government to do that.
Why would they protect these resources rather than take them? Perhaps if you knew them personally and rewarded them generously, they'd do it, but then I'd say you're personally involved in protecting them. That doesn't scale to the extremes we have right now. There are no billionaire equivalents without government violence.
Not only can you do not follow a law, but people in power do it successfully today. Immigration law is the obvious example. Those in power flout the law so blatantly that the law might as well not exist. Deportation virtually doesn't happen anymore. When there are no consequences for disobeying a law, it is the same as if the law didn't exist.
> Would you also agree that if enough people chose to not follow the law, government would cease to exist?
I think it might be better to word this as "enough people choose to rebel against their government." When that happens, there is usually some fighting that goes on and the government either wins or gets replaced. There is never a point with no government, however. The reason for this is because just about every government, no matter how tyrannical, is still preferable to anarchy.
> Natural law doesn't really preclude you from cooperating, unlike reality shows
If you think it's that much easier to feed yourself as a group via hunting and gathering, then I don't know what else to say: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/hunter-gat...
> Why would they protect these resources rather than take them?
Probably for cooperative reasons! It doesn't matter, though. These are hypothetical situations that I don't think there is much value in considering. I'm totally in the "anarchy is so bad I'd prefer tyranny to it" camp.
>>> "You're gonna want something that other people make or do or do to you. If they're not your parents or lovers or partners, you better have something to give in exchange for that thing you want. Otherwise, why would they give it to you ? Making something others want is work."
With respect to my presumption; yes, I'm responding to the status quo, my point may not be universally true but it also is in no way hypothetical.
Societies institute those practices. Societies can decide to change them.
Note that this precise wording is likely to be used both by people who insist that you have no right to someone else's profits and by people who insist that you have no right to profit without working.
The argument is that civilization and property rights robbed individuals of a natural inheritance; a claim to richness of the natural world, an ability to sustain oneself without entering a patronage relationship.
It does not engage with whether anybody needs to make any effort for survival.
The authors argue that UBI is a way to compensate for this loss of rights.
There was no such magical right. You have more right to land than animals, or worms, or the soil itself? When someone uses the words 'natural' or 'fair' or 'just' it is to invoke some emotional response, but generally has zero solid justification free from contradiction and conflicts.
Mankind made up the concept of 'natural rights' which feels good, but does not scale to populations of billions, limited actual resources, etc. Me being born does not give me rights to anything other than that which society has agreed to. If society has agreed that I work to provide my own way, so be it - it's the price I pay for the benefits of society.
You were born with zero, you actually have zero. Claiming rights to 'natural things' (which, by the same argument, actually were someone else's before you laid claim to them) is simply asking for the value of others to be handed to you for free.
By following social order, populations trade natural rights for the rights of their society. Collectively, the population can choose to stop doing that if they think they’re on the wrong end of the bargain. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be that they’re worse off, but that other parties receive much more of the surplus. This is how deals work in business and it’s the same thing here.
Beating the state of the world under natural law is the lower bound for a legitimate government, and as automation increases, a capitalist system without UBI starts to lose to natural law and lose it’s legitimacy.
Governments don't have a monopoly on violence. There's plenty of that without governments, even in civilized places. Governments help lower the incidence of violence by banding the people together against as much of the violence that not having a government allows.
And under your form of 'natural law', there is no law except that which you can take. You have no rights, only force.
I prefer governments and civilization.
Yes they do. Any violence not conducted or sanctioned by the government is illegal and is theoretically punished. When you say there exists violence with no government, you’re agreeing with me.
How about the people who have no home. Do they prefer governments and civilization? Would they not be better off if they could take your things?
Why do you assume that in order for a government to be legitimate, it must only satisfy you? I don’t really care about you or me or any one person. The question is whether the order we operate under is legitimate. In order for it to be legitimate, it must, at the very least, beat disorder for most people.
Would they be better off if idiots could beat them without fear of police?
If they don't prefer civilization, why do they go where civilization exists? Why don't they wander off into some deep national forest land and build their own place?
Because they prefer civilization.
>Why do you assume
Why do you put assumptions in my writing that are not there? Need a strawman?
> In order for it to be legitimate, it must, at the very least, beat disorder for most people.
It does by the simple proof that most people don't just wander out of civilization and create chaos in some wasteland. In fact, only a tiny, tiny minority of people actually do that, so it must be working pretty well for nearly all people.
There’s really nowhere in the lower 48 that fits this description at this point. I’m currently living in MT, and there are plenty of people trying to make this work with trailers, tents, etc. They all get kicked out eventually and often their belongings get taken. If they were growing food, they lose access to it.
> Why do you put assumptions in my writing that are not there? Need a strawman?
You said “I prefer civilization”, implying it’s relevant to the conversation. If it’s not relevant, why say it?
> It does by the simple proof that most people don't just wander out of civilization
People are constantly trying to do this. They can’t without being disrupted by government forces. It’s possible there’s somewhere in the world where you could make a life for yourself without having police called on you, but it’s not easy to find, and the reason it’s uninhabited is probably because it lacks food, habitable weather etc.
I did write that. Why did you then reply with "Why do you assume that in order for a government to be legitimate, it must only satisfy you? " which is not what I wrote? You needed a strawman.
If you want to read into what I actually wrote things you want me to have written, why bother any discussion? Just argue with yourself.
>There’s really nowhere in the lower 48 that fits this description at this point.
Nonsense. If they're going some place with a trailer, they are not remote at all. There's places in the Pahsimeroi area (near Salmon ID) where I've camped often a month at a time over the past 50 years (and my father did this since the 1960s) where you can go a month and not see a soul. In ALL the years I've done this, I've not one ran into a Ranger or law enforcement person.
1/10th of all the area of the US is BLM land, and lots of it is so remote that rangers NEVER go there. 240+ million acres. Lots of it so remote humans so rarely go there.
I have a lot of relatives in the MT and ID regions, so I get that a lot of people out there believe they want yo do this, but I've yet to meet one that will do it completely.
The problem with the people that want to live in a trailer (i.e., near civilization) or live in a tent (not really tenable long term) is they stay close to civilization, so they can access the fruits of civilization. If someone really wanted to be out for good, there's plenty of crazy remote area you can wander into.
And, if someone really wanted to be remote from society, there's plenty of Canada you can simply wander into, no problem (done that too).
Every so often someone comes out of the woods after 20-30 years remote and tells the story. So it's certainly doable. Most people want to think they're remote yet have the ability to access fruits of civilization, like medicine, food, gadgets. So again, they actually prefer civilization, or they could move out.
>People are constantly trying to do this.
Yes, out of 330,000,000 Americans, perhaps 1 in 10,000 do it. As I said - most people prefer civilization.
>They can’t without being disrupted by government forces.
Except for the plenty of people whose story gets reported rarely who actually did it, then gave up.
Another angle is: plenty of people own enough land out west to simply go into the center of their property and never return to civilization. How many do it? Pretty much none.
Because nearly all people prefer civilization.
When you write "People are constantly trying to do this" - what fraction do you think this is?
1/1000? 1/100,000?
It's so tiny that as I wrote: the vast majority of people prefer civilization, and those that do try what you write routinely return to civilization when they get sick, break an arm, face their first hard winter, or get old.
So - what fraction of people do you claim would prefer to live withdrawn from civilization?
> So - what fraction of people do you claim would prefer to live withdrawn from civilization?
I think there are a fair number of people that would be happy to start a new civilization (using civilization loosely here - a commune, whatever). Once this gets big enough, it's shut down by the government, particularly if members don't operate within US law.
There are plenty of things that you'd want to do to survive (clearing trees to farm, etc) that are illegal and would eventually land you in prison, even if you can get away with it for a month at a time. You're taking a very tight definition of being alone in nature, but there are other options that are not available to you including starting your own social order that are preferable to anyone who can't afford food and shelter.
This is probably getting too complicated to discuss over a text-based forum, and we also seem to be reiterating about 400 years of philosophy.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract
To refuse the social contract is to accept natural law (law without an organized government with a monopoly on violence). If too many people decide the social contract is not in their favor, they will do this by noncooperation or overthrowing the government. Under natural law, people are not prevented from building shelter, freely gathering food, etc. This is why people believe it is unjust and illegitimate to hold property rights above basic needs. Property (or at least more property than you can personally protect) is essentially a construction of the government, and freedom to gather and grow food is included in natural law. People who are deprived of important natural freedoms are likely to refuse the contract.
No, the "govt has a monopoly on violence" is repeated by the same people that don't read the entirety of links they post, and who use the word "literally" when it is not literally.
https://www.google.com/search?q=definition+of+government
The word "violence" appears in zero actual definitions of government among the first 200 on google (at which point I stopped searching).
Weber's popular phrase has been vastly superseded by political philosophy in the century following his phrase. Read more.
Oh, you're one of those people. Rather than giving a substantive response, you're going to dismiss me because I used the word "literally" in a way not to your liking, despite the fact that the usage of "literally" to mean "figuratively" has been common in English idiomatic practice since at least the 1700s.
And as far as the monopoly on violence goes, by all means, if you're going to go through the effort to condescend to me, enlighten me as well.
Yes, I am aware of the history of literally. I am also aware that when you want to have a "substantive" response, then using hyperbole and claiming things have a definition that simply is not true is no way to have such responses.
If you read your link, including criticism, and realized that the phrase you hang your hat on is not at all where the field that coined it has evolved to over the past 100 years, you'd understand why arguing for antiquated ideas doesn't hold up well.
I find when someone clearly does not care to absorb new facts, and they jump to catch phrases and hyperbole, they don't care to learn, and often taunting them gets them mad enough to learn something, when simply presenting the ideas will not suffice.
You fall into that camp. If you want to present Weber's phrase as "literally the definition" of anything, spend some time reading criticisms and Weber's ideas and the evolution of mankind's thought on the topic.
You’re absolutely avoiding the substance of the argument using the semantics of what the guy said, instead of addressing the point that the government decides who can and cannot commit violence and who is and is not subject to violence.
Peace. That's what poor people stop giving once they feel too poor compared to non-poor. No, this is not a value statement, but an objective observation about human nature. I do not expect anyone to like it (I do not like it), but not accepting it as a fact is... delusional might be a proper word?
After you accept that it is good for you to keep poor not too poor, you likely start wondering how to be efficient about keeping the poor not too poor, and afger that you end up somewhere very close to UBI.
Indeed. But I think the point of the article is that in addition to that, the actions of people have removed some of the options you would have otherwise had to acquire things. Or even more specifically, some valuable things have (for all practical purposes) a finite supply, and the amount of those things that gets distributed to you is not entirely (and in some cases not at all) dependent on your actions.
Poverty is the default state. It's there by default. Do nothing, have nothing. Do nothing as a hunter/gather, you're poor relative to your peers and you die.
Whatever cult UBI arises from is attempting to ameliorate the default by giving people something for nothing. Fine. That's honest.
So people claiming all the land in the world is a problem.
UBI in this form is not "something for nothing". It's trading control of land for a share of that land's bounty.
In any case, it's a lot easier to seem industrious if you start out with a huge pile of cash than without. If you park it all in t-bills and live within the coupon income you won't earn any prizes but you won't suffer any real economic anxiety or accusations of impropriety either.
Regardless, the OP was not necessarily talking about the generational wealthy, they quite literally said the "idle rich". And there will always be a fair number of those folks, regardless of whether it was multi-generational or not.
You are the one that took the thread off topic because you couldn't be bothered with basic reading comprehension.
> made enough money early in life that they could retire.
The OP was suggesting that previous aristocracy were occasionally asked to risk their lives, as if that was some sort of justification for their idleness. Nowhere do they make a distinction between aristocrats who "earned" their position vs aristocrats who inherited their position. So technically, proposing to "force the idle rich into some form of national service" (regardless of whether it was earned or inherited) is directly comparable to the OPs point about aristocrats.
You have to do a lot of work to extract food from the land, which is in the point. If there was no economy, just you and a fertile wilderness, you'd need to work your ass off to survive. But more likely you'd die from eating a poisonous berry, starve, contract a fatal illness, or get eaten by a predator.
I grew up in the Kimberley region of Western Australia alongside many people who still lived as traditional hunter gathers, in the 1980s I met and spoke with the Pintupi Nine (who had had no prior contact with "modern western culture") as I have some minor grasp of some western desert languages.
Regarding:
> If there was no economy, just you and a fertile wilderness, you'd need to work your ass off to survive.
Normally, Aboriginal groups were easily able to find enough food for their entire clan in three or four hours of hunting and gathering each day.
If you're in a fertile wilderness that you can read like a book and are familiar with then you need to go shopping for a few hours a day.
I have no idea where you got your "work your arse off" notion from - can you cite a source?
I'll concede that many people without a clue would spend a great deal of time thrashing about ineffectively wasting time and energy and then dying .. but we're talking about multi generational hunter gathers on the land they have occupied and shaped through land and plant management over 50+ thousand years.
Curious, what is the minimum requirement for UBI? A pulse?
A tax, but where the tax money goes directly to everyone instead of being allocated by a government.
Secondly, if a government isn't both confiscating and redistributing the money, who are the group of robbers that you would designate doing this instead? UBI requires authoritarianism.
Please see the Alaska example. Alaska isn't authoritarian.
> it's completely authoritarian because there's nothing voluntary about it
Yeah okay. It's exactly as authoritarian as every other tax. I thought you were using normal person language; I'm not going to argue semantics.
On the flip side, I wonder how much can be taxed? Is there a maximum? Currently, I work for the government through June.
Maybe I'm conflating UBI with increased taxes. The money has to come from somewhere, right? I'm in Southern California, where we enjoy some of the highest taxes and most expensive property in the world, so I'm a bit sensitive.
Also, he seems to correlate breathing air to being fed, which is wrong. There are plenty of places to get food for free, stuff that is about to expire gets donated. Just reach out to your local government or community college. It's a lot easier than hunting for it.
Last thing, here in California, about half the state is federal or state parkland and wilderness... The state itself blocks development and adds so much red tape to make housing much more expensive.
Yes, the part about acquiring funds is the same as what we already do.
UBI is an additional way for funds to be distributed.
> On the flip side, I wonder how much can be taxed? Is there a maximum? Currently, I work for the government through June.
That depends so much on the details of the system.
People on the lower end will gain more UBI than taxes increase. People on the upper end will get less UBI than taxes increase. The tipping point could be anywhere in a large range.
One version of UBI is simply a system where your income tax starts at a negative amount of dollars.
What humans created (to varying degrees, of course) is PROSPERITY, which is a surprising and remarkable achievement, and seems unique to humans.
I'm open to new/creative ideas for how to build a society that guarantees everyone a "fair" shot at acquiring more abundance for themselves, if that's what they want. I'm sure there are better arguments for UBI, and it's unfortunate this terribly flawed one is getting so much attention.
If UBI is going to exist without solving the problem of rent seeking it might be better to do it as multiple scrips or coupons, each good for only a particular thing (e.g. rent, food stamps, etcetera). This adds a layer of bureaucracy, but at least a person would be guaranteed a minimum amount of funds for each life necessity, instead of having it all taken by one thing.
And I know that this analysis of mine is missing quite a bit. E.g. Good Luck with implementing a UBI over the long-term, and for everyone.
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>"The thing is though, this isn't that far from what we actually did here on Earth centuries ago. Land used to exist without a monetary cost to access it. That was the natural way of things prior to the private property system and monetary system. We created poverty as we know it."
Taxation and indenturing existed before money. Taxes have previously included a certain amount of raw goods or labor. Even in non-agricultural tribal systems I assume people would be expected to contribute to the common weal as best they could.
>"It is a position not to be controverted, that the earth, in its natural uncultivated state, was, and ever would have continued to be, the COMMON PROPERTY OF THE HUMAN RACE. In that state every man would have been born to property."
I agree. But anyone who takes a look at squirrels or birds know that they fight over territory. Humans simply "civilized" the fight by attaching it to documents and currency.
>"If it's wrong to choke or starve someone to death unless they do what you want, then it's wrong to withhold air or food from someone unless they do what you want."
This is universally wrong. However taxes, and any other cost to living, is not forcing someone to do what you want. It's forcing someone to do something, anything which generates a cash income. It's an incentive to labor of some sort, though unfortunately, in our current system, it's also an incentive to become a rentier. The rentier is the problem, not the incentive to work. Though yes, no one should starve or be homeless, even if they can't labor.
>"Let's just recognize that Earth actually does belong to all of us, everyone in the present and future, and that those who own pieces of it, and who create things out of it, owe compensation to the rest of us for removing our access to what would otherwise have been common property."
I agree with the sentiment stated by Thomas Paine and this article. I just don't know that a universal UBI will be the way to do it. At least not without solving the rentier problem.
This is silly. First of all, only wealth can be created or destroyed, not poverty, which is the absence of wealth. My ape ancestor swinging from a tree without easy access to food, clothing, shelter or medicine is poorer than I am, full stop.
Second of all, there has never been a paradise where resources are communally owned without clear limitations on the use and distribution of those resources, usually at the behest of corrupt, tyrannical or murderous leaders.
Third of all, the existence of a monetary cost or private property is moot when it comes to defining ownership. An eagle doesn't use money or property laws to own his nest, but it's not like any other eagle can use it without cost.
Edit: To elaborate, "civilization" the way I see it has simply put the guardrails of due process around these things. We're still nakedly competing with each other, and in-groups are often bent on the destruction of out-groups. We just have laws and courts to make sure things don't get too far out of hand. It's peaceful coexistence not mass cooperation.
This is plain false. Your ape ancestor was born with free access to trees, fruits etc. Take away that and you created poverty.
> there has never been a paradise where resources are communally owned
Wrong again. The ape is a good example.
EDIT: Added /s in case it wasn't obvious...
Property rights, money, and rent are a strictly superior solution, especially among billions of apes.
Defending a territory with your life might be stressful and I never claimed it's good life but it something any animal can do without having to go against some other animal that inherited vast land from their ancestor.
TFA is pretty clear and yes some people here are trying very hard not to see the point.
“Things are better for me than they were before humankind literally existed” is such a hilariously meaningless thing to say. Why not go back further? Things are better now than they were before the earth’s surface cooled and formed a crust.
It would be utterly meaningless cruft to point out that things are better for humans than they were before the big bang.
The article wasn't arguing that a paradise of communal resource sharing with out limitations has ever existed. It was arguing that property wasn't the limitation and that people had access to the basics they needed to survive. And there are many, many examples of societies that existed where resources were communally shared and every one had access to the things they needed. Many of which involved various methods of communal decision making as well.
This idea that humanity's state of nature is barbarous, brutal competition is an a historical myth that has been used to justify some of the worst abuses of the powerful.
right up until their neighbors waltzed over and took it from them. Talk about rose colored glasses!
My point isn't that the past was some rose colored time. Only that false assumptions about human nature are frequently used justify deeply harmful policies and institutions. And that many people speak about how humans behaved in "that past" with very little actual anthropological or historical knowledge.
It is, in fact, much safer to be alive today than any other point in history. And a much lower chance of dying from violence due to other humans.
In fact there's a whole book about this if you're interested: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/...
This is an ahistorical understanding, that misinterprets economics, history, and sociology.
The problem of universal basic income strategies is that they only work when the earth is far below its human population carrying capacity for the current technology level.
If we were at carrying capacity the idea would be ludicrous because you not working would result in one of us starving to death.
Pre-civilization there was a very strict limit on human populations based on the natural resources they could extract via labor. Anybody who didn't work starved in short order.
Universal basic income is basically inventing a new right to tax other people for your sustenance (much like feudal aristocrats) in times when we have food surpluses.
That doesn't make sense to me.
You seem to think that if we hit carrying capacity, that means everyone is working full time to sustain that? Why?
Let's say all the farms in the world could sustain 100 billion people. Can't we run those farms with only 1 billion people? Why would non-workers cause starvation?
Why should the non-workers steal the surplus value created by those who work via taxation? Or is it only theft when filthy business owners do it via contractual agreements to trade labor for wages?
But I don't think either one of those is theft. I don't think the article was calling anything like that that theft either. It was complaining about how land ownership works.
You would starve because at carrying capacity nearly all of your income would go to food. There wouldn't be any slack.
Admittedly, you'd have to be one of the 'farmers' to have a non-marginal effect on food production.
Why would 1% of the population that creates all the food allow you to have 'free' stuff if them working 1% less meant millions of people would die? They could make you do anything.
A reasonable operation would have enough workers to cover sick days and the fact that people don't put in 100% every day. If they start running low on labor, they will hire more people.
And those nightmares of food supply shrinking by 1% are going to be there whether or not you have UBI. Like, I agree that we shouldn't get close to the planet's carrying capacity! That's not the subject at hand.
You are saying we can't have UBI because UBI is unsustainable. But our current system isn't sustainable either, and actually is putting us deeper into destruction year after year as we come up with new ways to extract more from the planet (and faster) and further pollute the planet.
If our current economic system was gradually pushing our technological level towards sustainability, then push on! But all evidence points to the opposite.
The haber process made ammonium from the atmospheric and made fertilizer, and allowed WW1 to have all it's explosives and shells.
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-soaring-fertilizer-prices-mill...
This is where it feels like your argument falls apart to me.
Suppose in 200 years the Earth is able to support a population of 10B humans, and has 10B humans occupying the earth. Suppose the labor to support those 10B humans is nearly entirely automated, such that we only need 100M people to work to reach the carrying capacity of earth.
You have an underlying assumption that each person's labor increases the carrying capacity of the overall population. That we're limited by the total production capacity of the human race, rather than the carrying capacity of the earth. And that was true in the past, but is less true in the present, and may become wildly disconnected in the future.
Labor is a product of civilization. Hunter-gatherer lifestyle was much less labor intensive than the agrarian lifestyle that followed. Instead of doing the hard work of making the land produce more than it naturally did, hunter-gatherers harvested whatever was naturally available.
In a sense, a hunter-gatherer tribe was like a pre-industrial army. Its size was primarily limited by the amount of food it could steal from the surrounding lands.
No, you shouldn't. The space station should have a plan to provide air to all its residents even if some portion of the people can't/won't work. Just like how our society should work even if some portion of the people can't/won't work. You'll never be able to have everyone working. Some people just aren't capable.
Our systems need to be designed with that in mind. And that's exactly what a UBI does. Redistributes a portion of the wealth that all of society creates back to everyone so that those who can't work won't die.
What would motivate someone from going to medical school and busting their ass to help and care for lazy bums mooching off the free stuff from the government? They'd just want to stay in their free housing, enjoying the free food and entertainment too...
This utopia won't be possible until we produce self-sustainable machines that can execute all jobs that humans can today.
In all seriousness, it's possible right now in most developed countries to live off of welfare long-term, without working a day in your life.
And yet, most people don't want to do it. You're looked down upon, poor and the lack of a regular occupation basically breeds mental health issues.
I think a lot of people really overestimate the economic motivators, while down-playing the social/internal ones.
What motivates them today, when they could get a fast food job?
UBI isn't supposed to be cushy (with current technology), it's supposed to be minimal food and shelter.
Then again some people don't feel they are doing well unless they see someone else doing worse.
I'm sure there are a few (1:million) saints among us that just selflessly give their all, but why would anyone else take any shit from their boss or customers?
I like fantasies too but really consider it for a bit; most people volunteer at animal shelters to play with the cute puppies and kittens.
The fraction of people who volunteer by default is about 15%; ~20% pursue win-win economic outcomes, a similar portion are risk minimizers, and ~30% prefer a zero or negative-sum outcome as long as they come out on top. The remaining fraction don't adhere to any consistent pattern, whether due to stupidity or selectivity.
UBI proposals in practice means that an exclusive in-group gets gets the wages the comfortable middle class wages for free and outsource all their work to an out-group that doesn't qualify for UBI. Working conditions for the out-group are slow to improve because they have very little political power. Meanwhile, the in-group stagnates and becomes completely dependent foreign work paid for by free money. This is exactly is what happens in the Gulf oil nations.
Everyone gets it, those that make money pay extra in taxes such that it nets out to $0 beyond a certain income level.
Is that difficult to conceptualize?
I don't have to imagine anything because I live in area engulfed by smog every winter. I literally have to pay to breathe fresh air (from a filter). What's worse the ones responsible for this just want to not have to suffer the cold.
It sucks, it truly does.
> but it's a common occurrence to tell people going hungry that they should just get a job to buy food.
Unrelated: how often do people actually go hungry in the US? I thought homelessness is a much more immediate problem when you're out of money.
“These politicians, eh? They’re so stupid! Why don’t they just make essential goods free? After all, we were better off as hunter gatherers! Also Spaceballs lol amirite?”
I say this as someone who supports some aspects of land reform and UBI. These sophomoric snipes at “conservatives” are just echo-chamber noise.
[0] https://gist.github.com/freakboy3742/c699f293c9b5e77ef289
There's enough food to keep everyone well fed. There's enough homes to keep everyone housed and safe. There's enough health care resources to keep most people reasonably healthy.
But we choose that some should starve, some should be homeless, and some should die prematurely because it allows some others to live a slightly more decadent lifestyle. Some, an obscenely lavish lifestyle. And yes, it is a choice we make as a society.
I'm not advocated for communism. We don't need a Gini Coefficient of 1. But maybe we could take some steps in the direction of sharing a bit more rather than continuing to rush in the other direction, and claiming that it's the fault of the poor that they aren't wealthy.
UBI isn't impossible or unreasonable. It just would mean that some folks- and probably a lot of the people on HN given software developer compensation lately- would need to do with a slightly less decadent lifestyle.
Since the end of WW2, we've torn down at least a million SROs* in the US and not really replaced them with anything comparable. In their absdnce, people have turned to living in RVs, the Tiny House movement has been born and there are too many chronic homeless, many of whom eventually end up in California which seems to take the heat for the failed policies of an entire nation.
The Tiny House movement began as an idea for how to live with less and when it ran up against the fact that it's not legal to build a house that small, rather than fight city hall, they slapped wheels on them as a hack to get around the rules.
The reality is that the US has made it illegal to build a lot of the housing that we once had in abundance and which worked well: small residential spaces in walkable, mixed use neighborhoods where life without car ownership was quite feasible and even the norm.
Cars have only been in vogue for around a hundred years. In that short time, we've whored out our urban planning processes to the worship of the car and we tell anyone for whom that doesn't work for any reason to quit their bitching and stop bothering people. If you can't drive for any reason, you are a second class citizen and how dare you get all uppity and act like you should have some reasonable quality of life without needing to either be able to drive or so rich you can hire a chauffeur to do it for you.
UBI won't fix our problems anymore than student loans fixed our problems. Student loans didn't level the playing field for the less privileged. It made them slaves to paying their debts, often while unable to get the kind of good job their degree supposedly guaranteed them.
Throwing money at this problem won't fix it. UBI won't buy poor people a basic, decent life. The kinds of goods and services needed to provide such largely do not exist in much of America and it's a fevered pitch uphill battle to try to establish any of them in far too many cases.
* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
UBI won't magically create inexpensive housing where you can reasonably live without a car. Most likely, it just causes landlords to jack up rent and get richer while doing liitle or nothing for the poorest of the poor.
Citation needed here, massively! At least in Australia, university was something only rich kids did back before free education and HECS.
Student loans are problematic because they put the student in lifelong debt, before that state schools were just, state subsidized and students were given scholarships, both of which are much closer to UBI. And even so, they're still better than nothing imo, though free-school-for-all Germany style would be better still.
I share your worry about landlords jacking up prices. In a "free market" you'd expect them to compete on price but obviously that isn't the case since they have all the power and are able to set their prices as high as the renters are able to pay. That's a problem and would affect people on UBI, but could be solved by additional regulation as well, which essentially every UBI supporter is in favor of.
I spent years homeless. I've had a college class in Homelessness and Public Policy. I've written about homelessness for years.
The poorest of the poor sometimes have no ID, thus no means to access a lot of welfare benefits.
I agree that getting benefits to people without an ID is a problem, but it seems very tangential to the UBI vs Status Quo debate.
What policy would you prefer?
As far as UBI is concerned, I'm just sceptical that it will transform the system. More likely it will be just absorbed by the system, e.g. my rent will just get more expensive and I will not actually be able to work less. Not saying I think it can never work, but I am not sure.
I share your worries, it does seem like it will have to be in some way tied to cost-of-living. Done right, where you can actually have the honest threat of being able to quit your job without worries, I think it would give a lot of leverage to workers.
https://chomsky.info/20150323/