Comment by Timwi
Comment by Timwi 2 days ago
> Is there a better way?
Yes, UBI. Then you can create what you want and your livelihood doesn't depend on it going viral.
Comment by Timwi 2 days ago
> Is there a better way?
Yes, UBI. Then you can create what you want and your livelihood doesn't depend on it going viral.
> How do we ensure that we don’t enter the failure mode of “not enough necessities get made”?
Pay higher when someone does things. UBI + income. If you want to live better, try doing something that will bring you money, but if you fail, you can still live and try something other next time.
Current model: if you try something and fail, you are homeless and starving.
I could maybe support UBI if you completely shut down Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, school lunches, subsidized housing, and every other assistance program. It must replace all of that to achieve the so-called operational efficiency of just giving people cash. Give them enough to buy those things on the open market, and if they choose to spend it on something else, that's on them.
If you don't trust people enough to do that, then you don't trust them enough to do UBI.
I think most proponents of UBI want this and I think it's a good idea. UBI is meant as social security, just not dependent on what you do and doesn't disappear when you have cash. Just give minimum wage to everyone and remove minimum payment requirement from economy. If you use up your social security/UBI in wrong way, that's on you. But there should be probably some education. And if someone can't effectively use your allowance (mentally ill, non-functioning alcoholic), then maybe we should put such people in proper institutions, but they could be funded by UBI instead of specialised assistance program.
Failing -> homeless and starving is a failure mode at the level of the individual. That’s not good, but failure modes of the entire structure are higher priority and the two don’t really compare apples to apples. Capitalism (absent corruption) is actually sort of cleverly recursive there because financial destitution by definition cannot affect producers of vital goods, because the act of producing vital goods is precisely what is rewarded by the system. So at least what you mentioned cannot result in systemic failure from a mechanistic point of view, only an individual level failure (which isn’t to say that the individual is “to blame”, I am not talking moralistically, just that it affects individuals and not the entire structure).
On first paragraph, okay how does that scale though. Who does the actual work of producing things people need to live, and how do we make sure that enough people keep doing that specifically, even across plausible variable configurations such as “birth rate increases because people have more free time which means now you need more farming” etc.
We need to characterize these dynamics, wouldn’t you say? Have you thought about it, or are you satisfied by hand waving?
"Absent corruption" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your statement. The idea that the system can't fail raises the question what do you consider failure, and what do you consider corruption"
If prices increase and wages don't keep up with them, an increasing number of people become squeezed by their environment. This is a slow event, sure, but enough drops can fill a bucket. The fallout from this pressure on the general populace will be the failure that you're saying can't happen. This seems inevitable without an intervening event to reset things.
With that said, I don't think your concerns are unreasonable, and I'm not sure UBI by itself could solve anything. At a minimum price controls or government administering of food and housing would be necessary to keep prices from rising in response to the influx of cash everyone would receive, but the problem of people not working does seem like a big potential issue.
I believe there have been studies to the contrary, but those studies necessarily miss the universal part of ubi, so they don't have the negative feedback loops that could spring up in a real implementation.
I don't think the "producers" argument is true, and even so it really does depend on the profession and on current trends.
What was vital yesterday may be obsolete tomorrow (see hospital secretaries vs ambient scribes for instance). I assume when you think of people taking a potentially "destitution-risky" decision, you think "entrepreneur without savings or backup income", not "hospital secretary". Yet here we are.
Also, in many professions, "production" is multi-level. Who is the producer in a hospital, the nurse, or the hospital manager? Yet I can assure you nurses, as vital as they are, get fixed term contracts or get fired all the time. Same with teachers and academics.
So, no, the system rewarding the hospital manager and the university deans for the "vital" work of their nurses and teachers isn't "cleverly recursive"; it's exactly the failure mode both you and OP speak of, except it's somehow both systemic and personal, depending in what angle you're looking at.
> financial destitution by definition cannot affect producers of vital goods,
Say that to farmers struggling to make meets end. We managed to make production of vital goods so efficient, that we don't need as many producers, so they are becoming not-producers-of-vital-goods en masse. So, now that they don't produce vital goods, they can safely go into destitution?
> only an individual level failure (which isn’t to say that the individual is “to blame”, I am not talking moralistically
Individual level failure means individual is to blame. But UBI is meant to give them safety net, so that when they fail, they don't go into destitution.
> So at least what you mentioned cannot result in systemic failure from a mechanistic point of view, only an individual level failure (which isn’t to say that the individual is “to blame”, I am not talking moralistically, just that it affects individuals and not the entire structure
Nice, but when you get rid of 20% of people and move them into "not usable, you won't eat now" category, each single one for personal reasons, then another 20% for other personal reason, you have to train them somehow. You could of course say that they should retrain on their own, but that's currently done typically after several years of giving them too low prices, so they used up their safety reserve.
> On first paragraph, okay how does that scale though. Who does the actual work of producing things people need to live
The people who feel they have the skills for this. Just like right now.
> and how do we make sure that enough people keep doing that specifically,
We have enough people to make food. We have to make artifical limits on how much food they produce or they would flood the market with food. We pay them to keep their fields unused for some time, kept in reserve. UBI would just be a guarantee that they won't go into destitution when they can't sell the food at good price.
> “birth rate increases because people have more free time which means now you need more farming”
I think birth rate might decrease even more. As people become more and more comfortable and stopped having to work as much as previously, they don't need children to secure their future.
> We need to characterize these dynamics, wouldn’t you say? Have you thought about it, or are you satisfied by hand waving?
I agree we should. Who would do it? Who would pay for such characterisation? Maybe you should try to do it? A lot of people think about it already.
How is UBI different from welfare?
On the surface, they sound the same
> Current mode...
Or, ya know, save money or get a job. Failure rarely leads to homeless and starvation. Most people are far more resilient than that, the current US homeless rate is ~1/500
If we need/want UBI to be a thing, educating people on the difference is going to part of the effort and debate
UBI discussion invariably is way off the mark. The only thing UBI solves is how to give out the money, which is a massive misdirection, the real problem is how to get the money. Do you gut the state and allow people who don't work to have enough money to barely survive as an underclass, or do you end billionaires and usher in a new renaissance where all needs are met and labour shall just be at our whim. These two vastly different visions are both UBI, but most discussion about UBI completely sidesteps that as it requires touching upon the more difficult issues.
Once you have control of the money to give out, literally every way of redistribution is as good as UBI. If you calculate how much money would be required for a reasonable UBI.. then imagine what could be done if that money was spent on communal, humane, services then it would be able to revolutionise the world every bit as much.
Necessities get made because there's someone to buy them. Only 5% of people are employed in agriculture and 15% in manufacturing. 80% of working people could do nothing and we'd still be fine when it comes to necessities. And we don't even have peak automation.
Most people want a lot more out of life than basic necessities.
UBI does not mean you don't work, nor you can't earn a lot of money. It just means we don't let you starve if you don't work and we stop making you work out of fear of leaving you starve if you don't.
I'm a psychiatry resident and developper. I have never been paid for my dev work but have produced quite a lot on my free time (site: w.olicorne.org ). I would do psychiatry pretty much no matter how much I'm paid for it.
In my view the most productive people of every field are not incentivized by money and would do it anyway. UBI would free up time and cognitive load of the most productive people I believe. Following a 80/20 kinda rule.
Hence UBI here would mean that the dev would not *have to* monetize.
> In my view the most productive people of every field are not incentivized by money and would do it anyway.
The idea that money is not an effective incentive to drive behavior is wishful thinking. Even just among devs, even just among devs who truly love programming, most would be doing very different work, and working for different organizations (or none at all) if money weren't the driver.
> Hence UBI here would mean that the dev would not have to monetize.
Ok, but the dev might still want to monetize, and we're back to the original question.
> Even just among devs, even just among devs who truly love programming, most would be doing very different work, and working for different organizations (or none at all) if money weren't the driver.
Somehow I can imagine that a world where a the brightest minds of a generation didn't spend their prime optimizing ad clicking wouldn't necessarily be a complete disaster.
> Ok, but the dev might still want to monetize, and we're back to the original question.
It's alright. Those who would like to monetize can. There are others who wouldn't and UBI would utilize that surplus talent, which otherwise had to perform tasks they weren't skilled at to earn a living.
> The idea that money is not an effective incentive to drive behavior is wishful thinking
It is obviously an incentive. But I think it's not an effective one and has many morally bad side effects.
I highly recommend taking a look at the work of Daniel Pink related to money as an incentive. See The Puzzle Of Motivation (~20min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
> most would be doing very different work, and working for different organizations (or none at all) if money weren't the driver.
With UBI I wouldn't be surprised if those would be even more productive doing something else they want. And others who couldn't do the CS curiculum even though they would have loved to because they had to find a job quickly would plausibly be at their place instead.
I really view UBI as something that puts oil in the society: people have less friction to be at the spot they're better at. People who want to do nothing will not slow us down anymore. And jobs that nobody wants to do would finally be paid by how much they suck instead of how much money your parents had to educate you.
> Ok, but the dev might still want to monetize, and we're back to the original question
I don't really see the issue. We're far from having shortage of ways to make people pay: ads, paywall, soft paywall, begging, rate limits. What's the issue with those? I certainly don't like them as a user and as a member of society but am fine with people doing that.
Especially with UBI in place: if the dev is putting a paywall, they have to compete with people that have plausibly much more freedom of time and mind to allocate to another free foss project. So in the end it becomes less profitable to be adversarial against end users.
> It just means we don't let you starve if you don't work and we stop making you work out of fear of leaving you starve if you don't.
Seems inefficient to pay for everyone to have kitchens in their house and pay them cash to get ingredients to cook. Couldn't we just employ some of these people as cooks and have them make meals in a centralised kitchen in every neighbourhood? A bit like the British Restaurant idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Restaurant
I don't see the connection with what we were talking about but:
- soup kitchen are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_kitchen
- community fridges too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_fridge
- and historically in france where I'm from, when we started having freezer technology it first appeared in shared houses for the whole village. People would go there once a day to fetch what they needed and would eat it. Can't find english sources but it seems very efficient. A least much more than every one having a fridge. https://france3-regions.franceinfo.fr/pays-de-la-loire/mayen...
That's why it works, lol. Those already driven by the bet paying off still have their incentives, and those who would love to try something ... can! Because they don't have overdue bills to pay with extra interest.
...and rather depends on the whims of the feeding hand instead.
Like, haven't got your 22nd cocksuckie virus booster? Get lost and die from hunger.
You can make cool shit without having to do the work of productizing and monetizing it
How do we ensure that we don’t enter the failure mode of “not enough necessities get made”?
Like it seems like people are ideologically for or against UBI, but I’ve never seen anyone discuss how the mechanism would avoid this outcome. Like I’m not saying it’s 100% the outcome that would happen on whatever time frame, just that even e.g. a 10% chance of that happening would make it too risky to attempt at scale. And like I don’t accept “some people just love farming” or “a lot of stuff that isn’t needed gets made now”, I need an actual mechanism description.