Comment by king07828 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by king07828 | Hacker News Reader

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>Foundations and other aspects of the private sector are capable of doing this on a larger scale than we realize

Exactly. And more specifically, if Silicon Valley were to identify this as a problem to solve with its brains, money, and technology, then the problem might be solved much sooner, more easily, and more efficiently as compared to waiting for a politically correct solution from a government.

One experiment for basic income that has not been tried: create a new cryptocurrency that makes UBI distributions to all wallets. The question created by such a cryptocurrency is whether the issues created by making such distributions (such as preventing people from making an infinite number of wallets) have practical technological solutions.

If there are technological solutions to the problems inherent in a UBI cryptocurrency, then the idea should be implementable by either a cryptocurrency or a government (if a government ever got around to it). Furthermore, if there are not solutions to the problems inherent in a UBI cryptocurrency, then that could help convince UBI supporters that 1) UBI might not be a good solution and 2) a solution other than UBI needs be identified.

Update, actually there is some Crypto UBI work being done

[1] http://cryptoubi.org/

[2] https://www.mannabase.com/

[3] https://medium.com/@fcecin/the-basic-whitepaper-7e789f16abe

[4] http://www.greshm.org/files/greshm.pdf

[5] https://ourbasicincome.wordpress.com/2015/06/18/circles-univ...

I would like to know if there are examples of Silicon Valley actually solving issues around disparity. Social and economic justice has typically been addressed by the margins of society — while those “instigators” seem have have deftly used technology. The Black Lives Matter movement, the career of women technologists who this year brought to the fore pervasive sexism in Silicon Valley are two examples that come to mind, maybe YC funding of Africa-based startups is another?

Sam Altman is currently running a small-scale BI pilot program in Oakland, if that qualifies.

This is less “solving a problem” than it is an experiment at this time, of course.

Or it could show that UBI works very well. Your biases are showing.

My preference is for UBI to succeed so that I could spend 8 -10 hours a day pursuing personal projects and research instead spending 8-10 hours a day doing what someone else tells me to do in order to eat.

I am skeptical that UBI will work because paying people for nothing seems like it may be counterproductive by creating rampant inflation or by acting as a disincentive for most.

The rampant inflation argument, which most economists would use to argue against UBI, is interesting because most countries seem to be suffering from deflation. If deflation is a problem, then inflation created by UBI could be beneficial to an economy. But getting a government to start up a new UBI program to combat deflation does not seem like an efficient path for creating a solution because governments are slow, rarely do things correctly, and magnify their mistakes by taking years to correct initial imperfections.

Rather, focusing the brains, money, and technology of Silicon Valley on proving the idea with a cryptocurrency based UBI seems like a much more efficient approach to either 1) create a solution (the preferred option) or 2) settle the debate so that we can move on.

To my mind (and I am no economist) inflation is the only constraint on a fiat currency's ability to create monetary tokens from nothing. We are indeed fighting deflation, almost globally. I suspect that the reason for this is that most economies are operating under the idea that the limits of productive capacity are not far off from what is being produced now, that is that they assume scarcity is a real threat. Historically, every time we have seen hyperinflation, there have been disruptions to production (e.g. war), or an economy that is built around one product (e.g. oil). In today's global economic system, local disruption (say a hurricane) is easily routed around by other suppliers in different locations. I think that our productive capacity before affecting inflation, and I'm just guessing here, is much much higher than we suppose. If so, I suspect printing money won't cause inflation because there is excess production capacity, and global competition would limit artificial price increases.

Because I believe this, I support much higher deficits, and thus am a hybrid Republican/Democrat: I want low taxes, and high government spending. However, aside from infrastructure, I'd want the government spending to be a bottom up type of spending like UBI, because it would give people seed money to start businesses, and more money to spend at other's businesses.

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