Basic income a sellout of the american dream; critiques YC basic income research

They don't actually critique YC's test program, they just mention it.

There's a weird tension around wealth redistribution that's rarely confronted directly. On the one hand, people worry that not helping the helpless is wrong and will probably lead to anarchy or communism. On the other hand, people worry that helping the helpless too much will lead to laziness and immorality. You can see it in this piece where they're like, obviously we have make the government give money to poor people, but not so much that they can survive without sweeping our floors.

I suspect that people with a Breaking Smart mindset aren't really thinking of other people as workers, but rather as partners and customers. The business started in Silicon Valley don't need many employees. Even businesses like Uber want all the drivers to be independent contractors, and that's just until they can get rid of human drivers. So the SV mindset is more "how can all these people afford my product" and not the industrial mindset "how can I get lots of people to work for cheap."

The SV mindset embraces the idea that you don't need every single person to be 1.1x productive because as long as one person is 100x productive they cover for 1,000 people.

Ah, the bullshit american dream.

Now I have to look up who it was with the "They call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it" line. A good line. Internet, at least, believes it's from George Carlin.