Unfortunately, it really seems like the plan is to strip the house of the copper for billionaires to become trillionaires, then burn down the house with the rest of us inside.
2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets.
3. what value do billionaires bring to the table if their insight and wisdom can be replicated by a machine.
UBI is similar to confining an animal? Deciding what and when it eats, when it bathes, where it goes? Training it, whether it likes it or not? Deciding whether it gets medical care? Whether it gets to have companions of its own kind?
I thought it was giving people money.
Not the worst, unclear to me why this was a concern in the first place. Be cool to have UBI though.
1. We aren't close to exhausting our resources and we're getting better at minimization and reuse. We need to spend money on cultural initiatives that discourage consumerism and reduce waste. The bigger issues are not the limited resources in, but the nasty things going out: the stability of the biosphere is far more important and 100,000,000 people in America outright reject the responsibility.
2. No, it's not. Or is disability and child welfare and Medicare and veterans care all keeping them as pets too? It's called taking care of your people. Anyway, glad you're proposing solutions too.
3. They're leeches and need to be removed. Tax wealth and productivity gains from automation to pay for UBI.
That's one way of looking at it. Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity. I would love to be FIRE, for example. A lot of people will love it. Some won't, and they will work.
I think UBI is not there yet, but a hallmark of this is the rise of influencers and time burned on media and Netflix. This tells me that leisure time is rising and we have the economic capability of sustaining non-productive activities.
But we're not there _yet_. I don't fear the inevitability of UBI in my lifetime for example. But I'm confident we'll be able to devise a useful system when we get there. In the end, we didn't have capitalism untill we thought up this system. There is surely another kind of system we could have converged to, I seriously doubt it's some magical rule of nature. But we did not, we wound up here. We'll end up in another place at some point.
Take just about any British musician from the past 50 years - the ones who weren't middle or upper class almost all say that being on welfare (the dole) was what gave them the time and freedom to be creatives.
UB40, for example, are literally named for the application form.
I also think that there are a large number of people who ended up lost without direction or purpose.
People are weird and different.
People on welfare? I can imagine a lot of these people "accept" that the goal is to get themselves out of welfare, ASAP (especially if there's a deadline), but they can't see a way to that goal - e.g. applying for jobs but getting rejected left and right, and feeling dejected.
With utopian UBI, one would be free to do what they want.. even if it's just jagging off the whole day.
There are lots of older people who go back to work, not because they need the money but because the need the structure. In fact, there is an increased risk of death due to retirement.
>Available evidence suggests it is unlikely that changes in health insurance and income can account for the increase in mortality at age 62. So, to further examine the plausibility of retirement leading to higher mortality, Moore examines which causes of death increase when men turn 62, and considers the connection between those and decreased labor force participation.
https://business.purdue.edu/news/features/2022/retirement.ph...
>With utopian UBI, one would be free to do what they want.. even if it's just jagging off the whole day.
People have need to feel like they are doing something. Usually something positive but they will settle for something negative, generally that ends poorly for society.
Also UBI would only, as my understanding is, take care of the basics. Food, shelter, medical care. So you would end up with a population that has enough to survive, hungry for more and no way to achieve it.....
We have the unfortunate combination of being uniquely individualistic and with too much time. Community-based societies, which we will have to transition to in a post-scarcity world, don’t have that problem.
1. Sometimes I wonder if the state shouldn't hire one of those fancy firms to push cultural outlooks about stuff to change. They have campaigns, but they mostly suck. If you put money on the table and say "hey, marketing company, by each 1% you improve this behavior you get x million dollars" I'm sure that would help motivation.
It's a good question. The Reagan-era response would be that having billionaires inspires people to work hard, take risks, come up with ideas and better themselves. In a post-scarcity era where the only route to wealth is capital, and machines handle the hard work and ideas, I'm not sure what benefit remains from having billionaires. What good are incentives at that point?