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Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

This seems to explain at least some of the UBI-love tech founders have. They live as billionaires in a community, that despite all their money and highfalutin ideas doesn't actually take care of its own, unless you have millions if not billions of dollars.

Of course to them the only solution is more money, that's the only solution they seem to know. They'd be more believable if they fixed their own literal and metaphorical neighborhoods first before continuing their personal campaigns of empire.

Sorry if it's whiny, it's just that the contrast between words and actions is stark.

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It's more than that. Money's value depends on everyone's collective attachment to it. The winners of a game remain so, only as long as a significant number of people are playing.

Ditto with USD, ditto with BTC.

UBI is one way to keep people playing; but I'm extremely wary of this idea. UBI without some sort of communal/anarchist/kibbutz-ian distributed structure binds society in yet another way.

'You're free as long as you do what I want', is not something we as a society should want, yet it is almost universally true. The US wants nations to be 'free' so that they do what it wants; it's only natural that this extends all the way down to the individual.

We already have conditional UBI for certain classes of people and situations. UBI is an incremental step of progress, and holding it up based on worries about not being perfectly utopic seems counterproductive.

The heads of almost every major industrial giant are sounding the alarm about the coming need for UBI. If they are right, and we come to a point where only a relatively small number of us are doing most of the productive work, and the rest are just collecting checks, the remaining producers are going to have a tremendous amount of leverage. So much leverage that I doubt there is a political arrangement capable of containing it long-term.

More than a mere imperfection...

I like the idea of UBI in theory, but I cannot imagine it won't have any impact on the cost of living.

At the very least, it would force companies contracting minimum/low wage workers to raise wages substantially (because why work on a shitty job if I can have the same money for free ?), which in turn would mean a substantial increase in prices, which in turn would make UBI money not enough to survive for most people relying exclusively on it, and we are back at square one.

UBI seems to me the classic "easy solution for a complex problem", that in practice would create even more problems than the actual system.

> raise wages substantially

> which in turn would mean a substantial increase in prices,

Higher wages only result in higher prices in non-competitive industries that rely on human labour. I think what would actually happen in competitive markets is they'd be constrained in their ability to raise prices and instead shift even more rapidly toward automation and capital investment to cut wage costs.

The optimistic scenario would be lots of crappy jobs automated out of existence, and people with more free time on their hands.

Maybe, maybe not. For companies that are making lots of profits, they wouldn't necessarily need to raise prices just because they raise wages. It's just that more of their revenue would be going back to the workers than where it's currently going (e.g. cash, shareholders, CEOs).

Or we find out whether those minimum wage jobs really need to be done.

Fix their neighborhoods how?

If you don't want to use income, I guess you need to rezone the housing? That's also extremely impersonal.

There's not much you can do as an individual, unless you want billionaires to pick random neighborhoods to sponsor. And that does very little to fix the overall situation.

They could move their companies elsewhere but even if that helps the neighborhoods it's a lot closer to abandonment than fixing.

> They'd be more believable if they fixed their own literal and metaphorical neighborhoods first before continuing their personal campaigns of empire.

How?

I'm serious about that - I think most of the tech billionaires who care enough to seriously support UBI are trying to fix their communities. Lots of people think their ideas like deregulation or more technology-focused schooling are counterproductive, but they seem largely well-meant. (The deregulation stuff in particular looks like a matter of principle; we have long-standing examples of what it looks like to push that selfishly.)

But all they have is money, really. The push for expanded housing has been choked by zoning boards and courts since Day 1. The tech industry has surprisingly little political influence because California is so large, and so entrenched with old-school Democrats. And "it came from tech" is basically enough to sink any kind of community initiative among anti-gentrification forces: low-cost annual bike shares were designed as a community good accessible to the poor, and the response was still to destroy all of the bikes as gentrification. "Throw money to people" is pretty much what's left to them, and UBI is a more stable approach to that than charity; even tech billionaires can't cover SF's housing costs alone.

I'm not even trying to defend tech billionaires here, particularly. I just don't want us to make all other change contingent on fixing San Francisco neighborhoods - because it seems like no one actually has an answer to that.

But you gotta understand, they have no time, they have to make the world a better place with Snapchat&co...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-GVd_HLlps

I've never been to the US, so forgive me if I'm ignorant, but if the problem is poverty, surely the solution is more money? What's wrong with a UBI or some other mechanism to deliver that?

As a US citizen, I see just handing out cash as a terrible way to fix this poverty. With the way our society operates, I'd put my money that whatever UBI is distributed, most of it will be leveraged upwards in creative and manipulative ways without very many productive gains.

Poverty is a complex issue because there are so many different causes behind it and they are often intertwined. A few reasons off the top of my head: systemic oppression and social prejudices, mental health, desperation, poor self-perception, lack of opportunity, irresponsible handling of money, ineffective upbringing, bad set of cards, medical problems (and the often accompanying debt), terrible education, malnutrition, a system that largely blames the impoverished for being so, rich people who get to set their own definition of charity for financial gain, and the list goes on and on ...

It'll never happen, but I think a much better solution would be defining a set of basic needs where more money != better quality: healthcare, food, education, housing.

Sounds crazy, doesn't it? Especially that last one.

The problem isn't poverty, it's exorbitantly high rent, caused in turn by huge demand for housing and huge incomes from the tech companies that all decided to settle down there.

The solution is to increase wages for the people that work there but can't make a living there. And for the tech companies to do their societal duties and spread work (and wealth) across the country instead of focusing it in that area.

You're confusing poverty with lack of money. Poverty is measured more accurately by looking at social capital (community connections that lead to jobs, family stability, etc). The world bank measures poverty in terms of health/capacity to work, life expectancy, and other factors beyond access to money alone.

No, the problem of "things are expensive because demand outstrips supply" cannot be solved with more money. Only by more things.

As long as these people are paying extremely high rent (and as a result need assistance in terms of food stamps) it means the trade off is worth it to them. That's what people don't understand about high rent: if you are paying high rent you are agreeing to it. It means it's still worth it to you. If you disagree with the high rent, don't pay it.

Sure, but that's not really an interesting or useful observation. You can choose to live in a bad situation and still desire, either personally or at a policy level, to make it better. The alternative, at least in the profiles I've read of people living in RV's along El Camino Real, is to be unemployed in Stockton. People will take their chances with a job.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15920864

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