The only way? What about built out infrastructure? What about universal health care? What about enforcing laws? What about enforcing truth in advertising? What about punishing various types of crooks in the various markets and transactions, financial and otherwise, that ordinary people take part in?
The only way? Like a silver bullet? Like that thing that the common idiom says doesn't exist?
I'm UBI-curious, but surely inflation would be inevitable if everyone suddenly had $x more disposable income per year? Landlords and grocery stores and everyone else would raise prices because they know people can afford it. Obviously if you're living in poverty, anything is better than nothing, but would the average middle class person be better off? As far as I can tell no country has ever tested true UBI (unconditional and for all residents) so its all theoretical.
Musk's idea of a Universal High Income (where money is no longer necessary because robots and AI give us anything we want) sounds great too until you consider scarce resources like land. Who decides who gets to buy the best properties on Earth if money is no longer a factor? What if you want, say, a human hair stylist or therapist: who would do such a job if they don't have to? We would lose the human touch in our lives, and that sounds awful.
Is that what UBI has become these days? That everyone is supposed to get some extra money on top of whatever they already have?
~20 years ago, when UBI was a popular idea in my country, it was understood as a technical fix to the welfare and tax systems. It was supposed to simplify the systems and make them easier to understand. It was supposed to fix the perverse incentives people with low wages face, such as the extremely high (often >80%) effective marginal tax rates. It was supposed to automatically give people the benefits they are entitled to, without having to deal with the punitive bureaucracy. It was supposed to help people who fall between the categories in the existing welfare system. And so on.
And it was supposed to be funded by making it an accounting technicality, at least for the most part. Most basic welfare benefits, tax credits, and tax deductions would go away. Progressive taxation would go away. Standard deduction would either go away or become substantially smaller. And the highest income tax bracket would start at 0.
Inflation is a common red herring that people arguing in bad faith throw at policies they don't like, because most people don't know enough to reject it.
The monetary side of the economy deals with money volumes orders of magnitude larger than the real side, and reacts to change also orders of magnitude faster. Because of that, inflation is almost always completely determined by monetary policy. A real shock that can out-impact monetary policy looks like the end of the world.
> I'm UBI-curious, but surely inflation would be inevitable if everyone suddenly had $x more disposable income per year?
The money doesn't come from nowhere. It's a transfer payment. People who make a below average amount of money pay less in tax than they receive, people who make an above average amount still receive the UBI but then the UBI is less than the amount of taxes they pay.
The result is not that "everyone has $x more disposable income per year" -- it's $0 on average, because lower income people have a little more and higher income people have a little less.
Notice that the existing welfare system already does this, but in the process creates a bunch of perverse incentives and income cliffs (you lose your benefits if you take a job or work more hours), leading to de facto marginal tax rates that are often >50% on lower income people when you account for benefits phase outs and in some cases they're >100%, i.e. if you make more money you make less money.
> Landlords and grocery stores and everyone else would raise prices because they know people can afford it.
That isn't how competitive markets work. If people had more money and a grocery store tried to raise prices, people would go across the street to the other grocery store.
It only works like that for products with fixed supply, i.e. things you can't make more of if the demand for them increases, because then if people have more money they have to outbid each other instead of sellers just producing more of what people are buying. This is one of the reasons zoning density restrictions screw people so hard -- land has fixed supply but housing doesn't, because you can build more than one housing unit on a piece of land. Unless the government bans that and mandates one unit per plot. Then people have to outbid each other. But your problem then is that, not people having more money. Notice that the same thing happens there if people get more money for any reason, e.g. more people go to college or the economy improves. It's a major problem that needs to be fixed regardless of what you use for transfer payments or if you do them at all.
> Who decides who gets to buy the best properties on Earth if money is no longer a factor?
The premise of that has always been pretty ridiculous. You can reduce the scarcity of some resource by making it more abundant, and that's generally a good thing. Good luck removing all scarcity from all resources. That's not a real thing.
Inflation isn't inevitable, especially in the long term. But of course it depends on implementation.
The goal of a UBI is to make sure people get their essentials to live. Right now, people get those essentials, one way or another (otherwise, they'd be dead; and to the extent people starve to death in the developed world, it's issues of distribution, not production or money). This makes the UBI an accounting trick: there's no actual goods not being produced that need to be produced, and it is just shifting costs from welfare, charity, family and friends, etc to the UBI program. This is not inflationary and frees up human effort to focus on higher needs than scraping together a basket of things merely to live.
A lot of the time, though, people also want some non-essential but still pretty important things covered, which is a bit trickier. In this case, there is the potential for more money to be chasing a fixed supply of goods. This will drive inflation in the short term. However, in the longer term, capital will be redeployed to capture that increased demand (while being deployed away from the desires of those taxed to fund the UBI).
This all assumes that the UBI is revenue neutral; if not, yeah, we will get a lot of inflation.
> if everyone suddenly had $x more disposable income per year
You mean as opposed to very few people?
I'm told that if one is very curious about the topic one should not start by asking questions but read the 100+ years of the same questions being asked and answered again and again. I cant say I've followed the advice but it sounds very sensible.
Communists shared alright 110 years ago in Russia, tens of millions of people failed to cope with that much prosperity and wellbeing, and then even more with unbearable freedom and peace.
I recently came across the idea of Universal Basic Capital (UBC): "granting every person a meaningful ownership stake in productive assets from birth." UBC would be enormously difficult to implement, as well as have its own weaknesses. It doesn't seem realistic, but introduces a new idea into the conversation.
UBI will likely be necessary but that won’t appease society. Everyone wants to have a chance to climb the ladder. If it becomes self evident that humans can no longer have a meaningful impact on their outcome, there’ll be riots whether they have a roof and food or not.
UBI is the actual solution, and is well understood enough now to know that most of the arguments against it are moot points or simply falsehoods.
Unfortunately, with regulatory capture at near 100 percent and electoral capture almost as bad, there is no incentive structure with sufficient influence to make it happen. Wealth will continue to be funneled to the top, and taxation schemes that act as a de-facto sales tax create incentives that favor even more centralized systems.
But wouldn’t it be great?
An interesting aspect is that I am constantly observing innovators with significant technical and technological skills that are employed in fields outside of their expertise as a “temporary “ measure that often becomes permanent if they get further encumbered, simply because they can keel out an existence while trying to build the next cool thing. So we are wasting probably trillions of GDP in talent because people need to go work in a labor job to support their wife and child instead of continuing his very promising project in training data for humanoid robots, which could easily net 100m+ in the next decade. (Actual example. I offered him $1000 a month to keep on it, but he unfortunately needs more to survive and he has eaten through his savings over the past two years of working on it.)
What if we build UBI but we turn out not to need it? Thats my worry. AI might possibly be “just another technology”. If we put in UBI we may disincentivize labor from adapting to an economic shift.
The real solution is to regulate the industry and break up monopolies. UBI is the modern equivalent of Walmart workers on Medicaid and food stamps. It’s raiding public funds for private profit.
UBI doesn't replace market forces with central planning. You're still incentivized to produce goods and services that other people want, and to do so more efficiently than your competitors.
UBI is good on paper but far from enough. Without Universal Ownership of the State, UBI is easily removed by inflation.
A better yet more difficult model is universal basic resources (food stamp to exchange for packages, social housing, etc.). People can work X hours on these social projects after reviewing some training (e.g. training of plumbing to maintain the social housing apartments). This also gives them some meaning in life. Of course this will degrade in the future if there is no ownership of the state by the people, but I think it’s going to last longer.
instead of UBI, we could just reduce working hours, while keeping the same pay. Easier to manage shifts than to upend the whole economy. Something like 3 days a week, with a german approach to sundays (everything closed).
The goal we all seek - liberation - is a distant one. That said I’m skeptical that UBI is the right way. UBI assumes and requires an elite ownership class and a powerful state to force them to share their profits. But as we’ve seen, such class members will organize to penetrate the state and contort it for their own ends. Thus any successful UBI will be a compromise or it will be dismantled by the powerful class that owns the economy.
In my mind, only community ownership of the means of production can truly achieve what we desire. Of course with all distant goals, it is hard to see how we get there. And to be clear I do not mean state ownership.
But I am curious, on my basic point of elite capture of the state, does that make sense?
I am struck that TFA’s title says UBI is “the only way to share”, amusing to me since literally directly sharing is another way. I understand we all have spooky ideas of what that means, but think for example of the concept of library economies. You borrow what you need, but you don’t own it nor have the right to destroy it. We share.
I think you make perfect sense. And given that one has to take a cynical take to the writings on UBI knowing the voice of the elite establishment will overwhelm any grassroots thinking since it is actually supported by a financial sponsor to ensure the message is received the world over, unlike say you and I blogging to 7 people. So one can expect most points on it in the public discourse to be biased and in favor of elite-benefitting outcomes. Indeed, when you consider most topics in the media, no one has unique perspectives, they regurgitate the same couple perspectives everyone else does, which are probably crafted by PR firms.
The more I think about UBI though the more I come to the sad conclusion that you can't eliminate money. We can't just give everyone everything they could want for free; I don't think the planet can sustain everyone living like elon musk. So there has to be some forcing factor, some hand on top of the cookie jar that tells your monkey brain that just wants to be high, fat, and orgasming all day that it needs to endure a delayed reward or face some physical exertion to keep the party going. And for better or worse, that forcing factor is by making you have to do something to get credits, that you return for your portion of the produced abundance. This mechanism is able to tolerate the fact that someone might work on efforts not directly tied to any one thing and reap a generalized benefit from all the diversity of that which is produced. Whatever comes next, has to get through that hurdle and the more I think about money the more I find reasons why it is actually a great tool for this sort of distribution of resources and incentivizing labor.
I guess the challenge is that there is a lot of lopsided compensation, where people like say elon musk are paid handsomely even though there is realistically only so much a single human can do. When Elon musk does something that say moves billions in real world dollars on his decision, again this isn't because he is a unique superhuman, just that we have set up power on this planet such where one single person can make a decision to move billions in real world dollars, and if it wasn't musk it would have been someone else in that seat because the seat exists at all. So much power shouldn't be accumulated in one position, because again, we aren't superhumans.
Well, there's definitely other ways. I would prefer a system where company ownership public and private has a mandatory public stake in both ownership and voting on company policy and major business decisions.
I would prefer it illegal for the wealthy to possess an excessive amount of assets. If your assets became more valuable than the limit, the asset share would automatically rebalance toward other employees and owners in the organization who are below the asset ownership limit.
You don't even really need UBI if healthcare, housing, food, and education are considered basic human rights that are included and free of cost at point of usage.
My take is that UBI is the most obvious solution but not one we should count on happening. There is just too much political resistance and a population-level mental block against it, at least in the US. Not to mention, Capitalism doesn't like if it can't push labor around. (Which is largely why the mindset exists, but I digress.)
I say that we need to realize that by the same token(s) that AI reduces the need for labor, it also reduces the need for capital. A single motivated, disciplined individual can now do, using AI and public elastic clouds, what used to require an entire team. So companies can decimate teams, but companies are largely a source of capital. If you don't need so many people, you don't that much capital either! You could potentially parlay an insight or domain expertise into a viable business. Your moat could be the obscurity of your niche, or relationships, or IP (yes, patents. Suck it up and use every leverage you can.)
Easier said than done, of course. This essentially means everyone becomes an entrepreneur. Most people are not cut out for that because (besides hard-to-acquire domain expertise) that requires being immersed in an ocean of uncertainty at all times. None of our education systems prepare people for that, or for what is coming.
I expect a time of disruption, but we need to realize that AI not only a tool for the Capital class. It's a tool for us too, if only we can adapt.
A think a more workable and politically palatable version of UBI would be some form of universal utility allowance.
E.g. the first x kWh electric you use, or the first X litres of water, or the first x GB of data you use is entirely free, for everyone (where X is some reasonable number that someone could just conceivably survive on). Then as you use more and more the prices start to gradually increase across a series of bands so that the heaviest users are subsidising those using the least.
It would promote efficiency, would be progressive, and would allow people to live without quite so much "bill fear" for essential utilities.
Plus it is not literally putting money in people's hands which is often unpopular with some demographic groups. People would still need to work but there would be some element of safety net.
> Plus it is not literally putting money in people's hands which is often unpopular with some demographic groups
I'd be really opposed to this. It'd only be ok if we nationalized the industries where we set these rules and rates. Otherwise, this ends up being a simple handout to private industries.
For example, let's say we say x liters of water. Well who's deciding how much x liters cost? If it's a private company and the government is guaranteeing it, you can bet water (which is relatively cheap where I live) will end up being the most expensive resource imaginable. And that may actually be true depending on the location, but it'd also be true in non-desert areas with plenty of water.
We've effectively had that here with the ACA, where the government has decided that it will cover the first $800 or so dollars of your health insurance. What happened? Magically, the cost of health insurance increased by $800. Private industries aren't stupid, they'll always charge the maximum price the market will bear. And when we start talking about captured industries like data provider, power provider, or your water provider... well that's where we can trust private industry the least as they literally have the public over a barrel. Utility boards are an OK solution, but the better solution is to turn these into public institutes instead of private ones.
A non-tradable utility allowance would incent people to waste these basic goods, and a tradable utility allowance, while obviously fixing this, would be no different than a UBI that was indexed to the price of basic utilities.
The “demographic groups” that find it unpopular dislike anything that can be remotely construed as giving to the poor. There is literally no purpose trying to cater to them while trying to set up a social program.
UBI, as the OP points out, as many of us have continued to point out/scream about, is a single component of a larger agenda of reforms.
It's not just about giving people money (though we absolutely should), it's also about ensuring wealth pumps can't just vacuum up that money into the hands of the already wealthy - like the stimulus checks did during COVID, like tax subsidies for healthcare do, like tax breaks for employer-provided benefits contribute to.
It's reforming housing from investment asset into human right. It's detaching healthcare from employment as much as it's about negotiating with pharmaceutical companies on pricing and creating more public healthcare rather than outsource to private firms. It's rent controls on older housing stock to incentivize growing revenue through volume (more housing) instead of scarcity like we have now. It's levying taxes on higher-priced rentals and luxury housing stock to force investing in more affordable supplies. It's penalizing for-profit employers whose staff disproportionately rely on government subsidies to make ends meet, and taxing the shareholders for supporting such bad governance.
It's taxing wealth and assets properly, rather than capping rate increases to keep people in homes (and thus drive up values). It's cities who reward businesses whose staff take public transit and taxing those who rely on private vehicles. Lifting property tax caps so that taxation rates float with the market, and accepting that this will mean some folks will see foreclosures and others will see valuations plummet as the market corrects itself. Incentivizing longer leases from landlords by tying property tax increases to lease renewals (yearly renewals mean yearly appraisals), to encourage more community and investing in buildings.
It's expanding SNAP to everyone by default on raw foods only, and expanding access to cooking and nutrition courses so every adult can eat healthy meals. It's shrinking the work week to create more jobs, capping overtime instead of merely 1.5xing it, and raising minimum wages. It's also taxing the absolute shit out of executive compensation, especially on equities and securities. It's barring share buybacks other than those amounts that would give the company 51% control over its outstanding shares (or more), and replacing Capital Gains with Income Taxes. It's closing loopholes and shrinking the tax codes.
It's so much more than "UBI and we're fine". There is no silver bullet. Nothing is an "easy fix", and no single fix will make a meaningful impact on the whole. It's nothing short of a coordinated rejection of the status quo in favor of a more equitable future that balances the need for innovation and growth with the needs of the masses for basic sustenance, shelter, healthcare, education, and safety. It's a cessation of promoting business over all, and a return to balancing business with community, with family, with individuality.
It's a lot of fucking work, and anyone lounging in here nitpicking UBI specifically without considering the whole of the problem shows they're simply not ready to deal with problems of this scale.
I think the issue with ubi is it's not really basic. Cloths food and shelter are basic. I'm much more inclined to support ubi if it's food shelter cloths.
UBI doesn't make any sense when you imagine how it will play out. Let's consider what it actually implies on the face: labor has been obviated through automation and therefore humans no longer have a purpose on earth. UBI then amounts to a bribe paid to the remaining surviving masses of humanity so they don't go on to destroy all the automated economy and those who remain in control of the automated economy, if those are actually people in this future and not some statistical models running on their own. This is unsustainable. The masses of humanity will inevitably want a larger and larger bribe to sustain a standard of living in probably an inflationary environment. Eventually a tipping point will be reached where the models in charge of the planet determine it is more efficient to eliminate humanity than to continue paying increasing bribes.
Have not seen a counter to the what-seems-to-me trivial point that the condition of possibility of UBI is the elimination of manual labour - or otherwise slavery and slave labour like exploitation
We never accomplished anything by everyone agreeing. If you want something and there are enough of you you take it. (It's easier if morality is on your side.) People who want to antagonize, moan or otherwise desire to get in the way need to be so afraid they wont do it or be discontinued prematurely.
At a time 99.9% worked in agriculture and agriculture was and still is complete bullshit. You can just mix plants and leave them alone. Just visit the garden if you want something to eat. Do a bit of modest pruning. Rabbits and other creatures will eat everything if you don't eat them. Just like with agriculture the rabbits will upscale their population to match whatever food is available.
I'm simplifying of course. The point being, 3% now works in agriculture. We know how to make durable houses, durable clothing, durable everything-you-need's stop listening to your wife (lol), all you need is a roof, bed, cloths, food, a good book and some time to think about what the hell we are doing.
Everything else is certainly nice to have but it should not be part of this topic.
One of my funny hypothetical: Say we rip all the roads out of the city and fill her up with chickens. Then, in stead of driving to your job you pick eggs and catch a chicken. Then, after 10 minutes your job is done for the day. If people don't like eggs or chicken that's fine, we can feed them to the chickens, or the delicious maggots that grow on them. I mean proverbial of course, no way you need to explain how it works to the chicken, it will do all that for free on factory settings.
I'm sure this is all very hard to understand, it might not make any sense to you. Then think of the UBI as the ultimate crypto currency. You take a unit of humans, a unit of time, multiply the two and hand the coins to the human. You get nice linear expansion and nice coin distribution. You only need proof of humans and proof of time. The white paper will be very short and (sadly) lack all the interesting math.
I still haven’t seen a convincing exoneration for how to avoid UBI warping politics. It seems politically impossible to lower (see Alaska’s challenges [1]) and too attractive for politicians to promise to increase in order to easily win votes.
UBI doesn't address structural inequality, and because of inflation it doesn't make necessities (health care, housing, child care, education, food) affordable. We've suffered conservatives opposing simple policies of:
* progressive taxation
* wealth tax
* government training workers, procuring supplies, and investing in advances
...but they're all gone now, so let's get going on this stuff.
I'm (again) shocked that so poor article on UBI triggers any serious discussion: I mean, where's a math behind it? For US alone 1400usd for each adult and 500usd for kid would generate...4,95 trillion fucking dollars annually!
Won't any BUI proponent explain simply HOW (realistically) can it happen?
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 60.8 ms ] threadThe only way? Like a silver bullet? Like that thing that the common idiom says doesn't exist?
Musk's idea of a Universal High Income (where money is no longer necessary because robots and AI give us anything we want) sounds great too until you consider scarce resources like land. Who decides who gets to buy the best properties on Earth if money is no longer a factor? What if you want, say, a human hair stylist or therapist: who would do such a job if they don't have to? We would lose the human touch in our lives, and that sounds awful.
~20 years ago, when UBI was a popular idea in my country, it was understood as a technical fix to the welfare and tax systems. It was supposed to simplify the systems and make them easier to understand. It was supposed to fix the perverse incentives people with low wages face, such as the extremely high (often >80%) effective marginal tax rates. It was supposed to automatically give people the benefits they are entitled to, without having to deal with the punitive bureaucracy. It was supposed to help people who fall between the categories in the existing welfare system. And so on.
And it was supposed to be funded by making it an accounting technicality, at least for the most part. Most basic welfare benefits, tax credits, and tax deductions would go away. Progressive taxation would go away. Standard deduction would either go away or become substantially smaller. And the highest income tax bracket would start at 0.
The monetary side of the economy deals with money volumes orders of magnitude larger than the real side, and reacts to change also orders of magnitude faster. Because of that, inflation is almost always completely determined by monetary policy. A real shock that can out-impact monetary policy looks like the end of the world.
The money doesn't come from nowhere. It's a transfer payment. People who make a below average amount of money pay less in tax than they receive, people who make an above average amount still receive the UBI but then the UBI is less than the amount of taxes they pay.
The result is not that "everyone has $x more disposable income per year" -- it's $0 on average, because lower income people have a little more and higher income people have a little less.
Notice that the existing welfare system already does this, but in the process creates a bunch of perverse incentives and income cliffs (you lose your benefits if you take a job or work more hours), leading to de facto marginal tax rates that are often >50% on lower income people when you account for benefits phase outs and in some cases they're >100%, i.e. if you make more money you make less money.
> Landlords and grocery stores and everyone else would raise prices because they know people can afford it.
That isn't how competitive markets work. If people had more money and a grocery store tried to raise prices, people would go across the street to the other grocery store.
It only works like that for products with fixed supply, i.e. things you can't make more of if the demand for them increases, because then if people have more money they have to outbid each other instead of sellers just producing more of what people are buying. This is one of the reasons zoning density restrictions screw people so hard -- land has fixed supply but housing doesn't, because you can build more than one housing unit on a piece of land. Unless the government bans that and mandates one unit per plot. Then people have to outbid each other. But your problem then is that, not people having more money. Notice that the same thing happens there if people get more money for any reason, e.g. more people go to college or the economy improves. It's a major problem that needs to be fixed regardless of what you use for transfer payments or if you do them at all.
> Who decides who gets to buy the best properties on Earth if money is no longer a factor?
The premise of that has always been pretty ridiculous. You can reduce the scarcity of some resource by making it more abundant, and that's generally a good thing. Good luck removing all scarcity from all resources. That's not a real thing.
The goal of a UBI is to make sure people get their essentials to live. Right now, people get those essentials, one way or another (otherwise, they'd be dead; and to the extent people starve to death in the developed world, it's issues of distribution, not production or money). This makes the UBI an accounting trick: there's no actual goods not being produced that need to be produced, and it is just shifting costs from welfare, charity, family and friends, etc to the UBI program. This is not inflationary and frees up human effort to focus on higher needs than scraping together a basket of things merely to live.
A lot of the time, though, people also want some non-essential but still pretty important things covered, which is a bit trickier. In this case, there is the potential for more money to be chasing a fixed supply of goods. This will drive inflation in the short term. However, in the longer term, capital will be redeployed to capture that increased demand (while being deployed away from the desires of those taxed to fund the UBI).
This all assumes that the UBI is revenue neutral; if not, yeah, we will get a lot of inflation.
You mean as opposed to very few people?
I'm told that if one is very curious about the topic one should not start by asking questions but read the 100+ years of the same questions being asked and answered again and again. I cant say I've followed the advice but it sounds very sensible.
https://www.digitalistpapers.com/vol2/autorthompson#:~:text=...
Unfortunately, with regulatory capture at near 100 percent and electoral capture almost as bad, there is no incentive structure with sufficient influence to make it happen. Wealth will continue to be funneled to the top, and taxation schemes that act as a de-facto sales tax create incentives that favor even more centralized systems.
But wouldn’t it be great?
An interesting aspect is that I am constantly observing innovators with significant technical and technological skills that are employed in fields outside of their expertise as a “temporary “ measure that often becomes permanent if they get further encumbered, simply because they can keel out an existence while trying to build the next cool thing. So we are wasting probably trillions of GDP in talent because people need to go work in a labor job to support their wife and child instead of continuing his very promising project in training data for humanoid robots, which could easily net 100m+ in the next decade. (Actual example. I offered him $1000 a month to keep on it, but he unfortunately needs more to survive and he has eaten through his savings over the past two years of working on it.)
The real solution is to regulate the industry and break up monopolies. UBI is the modern equivalent of Walmart workers on Medicaid and food stamps. It’s raiding public funds for private profit.
A better yet more difficult model is universal basic resources (food stamp to exchange for packages, social housing, etc.). People can work X hours on these social projects after reviewing some training (e.g. training of plumbing to maintain the social housing apartments). This also gives them some meaning in life. Of course this will degrade in the future if there is no ownership of the state by the people, but I think it’s going to last longer.
In my mind, only community ownership of the means of production can truly achieve what we desire. Of course with all distant goals, it is hard to see how we get there. And to be clear I do not mean state ownership.
But I am curious, on my basic point of elite capture of the state, does that make sense?
I am struck that TFA’s title says UBI is “the only way to share”, amusing to me since literally directly sharing is another way. I understand we all have spooky ideas of what that means, but think for example of the concept of library economies. You borrow what you need, but you don’t own it nor have the right to destroy it. We share.
The more I think about UBI though the more I come to the sad conclusion that you can't eliminate money. We can't just give everyone everything they could want for free; I don't think the planet can sustain everyone living like elon musk. So there has to be some forcing factor, some hand on top of the cookie jar that tells your monkey brain that just wants to be high, fat, and orgasming all day that it needs to endure a delayed reward or face some physical exertion to keep the party going. And for better or worse, that forcing factor is by making you have to do something to get credits, that you return for your portion of the produced abundance. This mechanism is able to tolerate the fact that someone might work on efforts not directly tied to any one thing and reap a generalized benefit from all the diversity of that which is produced. Whatever comes next, has to get through that hurdle and the more I think about money the more I find reasons why it is actually a great tool for this sort of distribution of resources and incentivizing labor.
I guess the challenge is that there is a lot of lopsided compensation, where people like say elon musk are paid handsomely even though there is realistically only so much a single human can do. When Elon musk does something that say moves billions in real world dollars on his decision, again this isn't because he is a unique superhuman, just that we have set up power on this planet such where one single person can make a decision to move billions in real world dollars, and if it wasn't musk it would have been someone else in that seat because the seat exists at all. So much power shouldn't be accumulated in one position, because again, we aren't superhumans.
I would prefer it illegal for the wealthy to possess an excessive amount of assets. If your assets became more valuable than the limit, the asset share would automatically rebalance toward other employees and owners in the organization who are below the asset ownership limit.
You don't even really need UBI if healthcare, housing, food, and education are considered basic human rights that are included and free of cost at point of usage.
I say that we need to realize that by the same token(s) that AI reduces the need for labor, it also reduces the need for capital. A single motivated, disciplined individual can now do, using AI and public elastic clouds, what used to require an entire team. So companies can decimate teams, but companies are largely a source of capital. If you don't need so many people, you don't that much capital either! You could potentially parlay an insight or domain expertise into a viable business. Your moat could be the obscurity of your niche, or relationships, or IP (yes, patents. Suck it up and use every leverage you can.)
Easier said than done, of course. This essentially means everyone becomes an entrepreneur. Most people are not cut out for that because (besides hard-to-acquire domain expertise) that requires being immersed in an ocean of uncertainty at all times. None of our education systems prepare people for that, or for what is coming.
I expect a time of disruption, but we need to realize that AI not only a tool for the Capital class. It's a tool for us too, if only we can adapt.
E.g. the first x kWh electric you use, or the first X litres of water, or the first x GB of data you use is entirely free, for everyone (where X is some reasonable number that someone could just conceivably survive on). Then as you use more and more the prices start to gradually increase across a series of bands so that the heaviest users are subsidising those using the least.
It would promote efficiency, would be progressive, and would allow people to live without quite so much "bill fear" for essential utilities.
Plus it is not literally putting money in people's hands which is often unpopular with some demographic groups. People would still need to work but there would be some element of safety net.
I'd be really opposed to this. It'd only be ok if we nationalized the industries where we set these rules and rates. Otherwise, this ends up being a simple handout to private industries.
For example, let's say we say x liters of water. Well who's deciding how much x liters cost? If it's a private company and the government is guaranteeing it, you can bet water (which is relatively cheap where I live) will end up being the most expensive resource imaginable. And that may actually be true depending on the location, but it'd also be true in non-desert areas with plenty of water.
We've effectively had that here with the ACA, where the government has decided that it will cover the first $800 or so dollars of your health insurance. What happened? Magically, the cost of health insurance increased by $800. Private industries aren't stupid, they'll always charge the maximum price the market will bear. And when we start talking about captured industries like data provider, power provider, or your water provider... well that's where we can trust private industry the least as they literally have the public over a barrel. Utility boards are an OK solution, but the better solution is to turn these into public institutes instead of private ones.
It's not just about giving people money (though we absolutely should), it's also about ensuring wealth pumps can't just vacuum up that money into the hands of the already wealthy - like the stimulus checks did during COVID, like tax subsidies for healthcare do, like tax breaks for employer-provided benefits contribute to.
It's reforming housing from investment asset into human right. It's detaching healthcare from employment as much as it's about negotiating with pharmaceutical companies on pricing and creating more public healthcare rather than outsource to private firms. It's rent controls on older housing stock to incentivize growing revenue through volume (more housing) instead of scarcity like we have now. It's levying taxes on higher-priced rentals and luxury housing stock to force investing in more affordable supplies. It's penalizing for-profit employers whose staff disproportionately rely on government subsidies to make ends meet, and taxing the shareholders for supporting such bad governance.
It's taxing wealth and assets properly, rather than capping rate increases to keep people in homes (and thus drive up values). It's cities who reward businesses whose staff take public transit and taxing those who rely on private vehicles. Lifting property tax caps so that taxation rates float with the market, and accepting that this will mean some folks will see foreclosures and others will see valuations plummet as the market corrects itself. Incentivizing longer leases from landlords by tying property tax increases to lease renewals (yearly renewals mean yearly appraisals), to encourage more community and investing in buildings.
It's expanding SNAP to everyone by default on raw foods only, and expanding access to cooking and nutrition courses so every adult can eat healthy meals. It's shrinking the work week to create more jobs, capping overtime instead of merely 1.5xing it, and raising minimum wages. It's also taxing the absolute shit out of executive compensation, especially on equities and securities. It's barring share buybacks other than those amounts that would give the company 51% control over its outstanding shares (or more), and replacing Capital Gains with Income Taxes. It's closing loopholes and shrinking the tax codes.
It's so much more than "UBI and we're fine". There is no silver bullet. Nothing is an "easy fix", and no single fix will make a meaningful impact on the whole. It's nothing short of a coordinated rejection of the status quo in favor of a more equitable future that balances the need for innovation and growth with the needs of the masses for basic sustenance, shelter, healthcare, education, and safety. It's a cessation of promoting business over all, and a return to balancing business with community, with family, with individuality.
It's a lot of fucking work, and anyone lounging in here nitpicking UBI specifically without considering the whole of the problem shows they're simply not ready to deal with problems of this scale.
At a time 99.9% worked in agriculture and agriculture was and still is complete bullshit. You can just mix plants and leave them alone. Just visit the garden if you want something to eat. Do a bit of modest pruning. Rabbits and other creatures will eat everything if you don't eat them. Just like with agriculture the rabbits will upscale their population to match whatever food is available.
I'm simplifying of course. The point being, 3% now works in agriculture. We know how to make durable houses, durable clothing, durable everything-you-need's stop listening to your wife (lol), all you need is a roof, bed, cloths, food, a good book and some time to think about what the hell we are doing.
Everything else is certainly nice to have but it should not be part of this topic.
One of my funny hypothetical: Say we rip all the roads out of the city and fill her up with chickens. Then, in stead of driving to your job you pick eggs and catch a chicken. Then, after 10 minutes your job is done for the day. If people don't like eggs or chicken that's fine, we can feed them to the chickens, or the delicious maggots that grow on them. I mean proverbial of course, no way you need to explain how it works to the chicken, it will do all that for free on factory settings.
I'm sure this is all very hard to understand, it might not make any sense to you. Then think of the UBI as the ultimate crypto currency. You take a unit of humans, a unit of time, multiply the two and hand the coins to the human. You get nice linear expansion and nice coin distribution. You only need proof of humans and proof of time. The white paper will be very short and (sadly) lack all the interesting math.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/07/03/738569508/university-of-alask...
* progressive taxation
* wealth tax
* government training workers, procuring supplies, and investing in advances
...but they're all gone now, so let's get going on this stuff.
Won't any BUI proponent explain simply HOW (realistically) can it happen?