But lizard brains gotta keep folks under their thumb and horde resources. Alas.
> but! A lot, probably more than we imagine, would get bored and… do something.
I'm not sure why we think everyone would just veg out WALL-E style and why the idea is so pervasive. Everyone says "well I wouldn't, but /they/ would". I think there's strong evidence that people would do things too. You only have to look at people who retire or the billionaire class. If the people with the greatest ability to check out and do nothing don't, why do we think so many would? People are people after all. And if there's a secret to why some still work, maybe we should really figure that out. Especially as we're now envisioning a future where robots do all the labor.
I think people are drawn to labour but not drudgery, and a lot of jobs don't really do much to differentiate between the two. I reckon if less people had to worry about putting bread on the table what we'd see is a massive cultural revival, a shot in the arm to music and the arts.
- The Manual, by the KLF
Basic econ 101: inelastic demand means supply can be as expensive as the limited number who are lucky enough to get it are able to afford.
Bell Labs, generally think tanks, they work by paying _enough_ to raise someone to the capitalist society equivalent of a Noble.
Want to fix the problem for everyone in society, not just an 'intellectual elite'? Gotta regulate the market, put enough supply into it that the price is forced to drop and the average __PURCHASE POWER__ raises even without otherwise raising wages.
The market of course needs regulation, or, rather, stewardship: from protection of property rights all the way to limiting monopolies, dumping, etc. The market must remain free and varied in order to do its economic work for the benefit of the society. No better mechanism has been invented for last few millennia.
Redistribution to provide a safety net to those in trouble is usually a good thing to have, but it does not require to dismantle the market. It mostly requires an agreement in the society.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
A revenue neutral UBI check at some subsistence level and killing all other government assistance including lower tax brackets would in the short term significantly lower the standard of living for many low income Americans and boost others. However people would try and maximize their lifestyle and for most people that would be through working. Others would opt out and try and make being really poor work for them.
Essentially you remove central planning around poverty and as the government stops requiring rent stabilized apartments etc. Which in the short term pushes a lot of poor people out of major cities but simultaneously puts upward pressure on wages to retain those workers and pushes down rents via those suddenly available apartments. It doesn’t actually create or destroy wealth directly, you just get a more efficient allocation of resources.
Adding a land tax too, now that would be, that would really, that would fix some things
This returns us back to the problem of some guaranteed payments to those we don't want to let die, and maybe want to live not entirely miserably, and the administration thereof.
Another danger is the contraction of the economy: businesses close, unable to find workers, the level of UBI goes down, people's income (UBI + salary) also goes down, and they can afford fewer goods, more businesses close, etc. When people try to find work because UBI is not enough, there may be not enough vacancies, until the economy spins up again sufficiently. It's not unlike a business cycle, but the incentive for a contraction may be stronger.
There’s a long way between uncomfortable and death here, entitlement spending is already over 10k/person/year and that’s excluding the impact of progressive taxation. Revenue neutral flat tax and a 20+k UBI isn’t unrealistic. A reasonable argument can be made for universal healthcare being part of UBI, but that’s a separate and quite nuanced discussion.
Not that I think there’s any chance of a UBI in the US, but it’s an interesting intellectual exercise.
Citation needed. If you're referring to the USSR, please pick an economic measure that you think would have been better, and show why the calculation problem was the cause of its deficiency. USSR was incredibly successful economically, whether it was GDP growth, technological advancement, labor productivity, raw output, etc. Keep in mind all of this occurred under extremely adverse conditions of war and political strife, and starting with an uneducated agrarian population and basically no capital stock or industry.
The Austrian economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe writes of Hayek's calculation problem:
> [T]his is surely an absurd thesis. First, if the centralized use of knowledge is the problem, then it is difficult to explain why there are families, clubs, and firms, or why they do not face the very same problems as socialism. Families and firms also involve central planning. The family head and the owner of the firm also make plans which bind the use other people can make of their private knowledge […] Every human organization, composed as it is of distinct individuals, constantly and unavoidably makes use of decentralized knowledge. In socialism, decentralized knowledge is utilized no less than in private firms or households. As in a firm, a central plan exists under socialism; and within the constraints of this plan, the socialist workers and the firm’s employees utilize their own decentralized knowledge of circumstances of time and place to implement and execute the plan […] within Hayek’s analytical framework, no difference between socialism and a private corporation exists. Hence, there can also be no more wrong with the former than with the latter.
Indeed, a private company usually operates in a way a centralized monarchy / oligarchy would operate: the bosses determine a plan, the subordinates work on implementing it, with some wiggle room but with limited autonomy.
Larger companies do suffer from inefficiencies of centralization, they do suffer waste, slowdowns, bureaucracy, and skewed incentives. This is well-documented, and happens right now, as we facepalm seeing a huge corp doing a terrible, wasteful move after wasteful move, according to some directives from the top. This is why some efficient corporations are internally split into semi-independent units that effectively trade with each other, and even have an internal market of sorts. (See the whole idea of keiretsu.)
But even the most giant centralized corporations, like Google, Apple, or the AT&T of 1950s, exist in a much, much larger economy, still driven mostly by market forces, so the whole economy does not go haywire under universal central planning, as did the economy of the late USSR, or the economy of China under Mao, to take a couple of really large-scale examples.
In the same basic econ 101, you learn that real estate demand is localized. UBI allows folks to move to middle of nowhere Montana.
Social connections like family / friends / potential mates
Livelihood needs like education / jobs / foods (1st world, the food they like is fresh / better; historic / other food exists!)
General QoL climate / beauty / recreational opportunities
Many big cities cost more because it's where the opportunity is, or where their family that previously/currently prospered from that opportunity resides. For many of us on HN it's where the sort of jobs we'd be good at contributing to society exist. Even if some corp opened an office in the middle of Montana there wouldn't be anything else there as other opportunities. Heck given UBI, I'd rather join Star Fleet with awesome healthcare for all, cool technical challenges, and anything other than Starbase 80.
That's why experiments need to be made.
Now with research pay Bell was right up there with other prestigious institutions, elite but not like the nobility of old.
I would say very much more like a "Gentleman" scientist of antiquity, whether they were patrons or patronized in some way, they could focus daily on the tasks at hand even when they are some of the most unlikely actions to yield miracles.
Simply because the breakthroughs that are needed are the same as it ever was, and almost no focused tasks lead in that direction ever, so you're going to have to do a lot of "seemingly pointless" stuff to even come up with one good thing. You better get started right away and don't lift your nose from the grindstone either ;)
People get bored doing nothing, and enjoy contributing to their community.
No, they're not going to go get shitty factory jobs. But that's OK, because all those jobs are now automated and done by robots.
But they are going to go and do something useful, because that's what people do. The anti-UBI trope that "given basic income, everyone will just sit around on their arses watching TikTok videos" has been proven wrong in every study that measured it.
You can replace coal mines above with a million other things, I chose a dramatic, niche example.
The fact is that in recorded history, there have been almost no instances of economic setups without the downtrodden. I like efforts like UBI being made to address that, but it is important to address the fact that UBI itself is not the final solution. It is still possible that we reach a working solution eventually(who knows when?) by exploring things like UBI though. A lot of online discourse simply lies in a narrow band of "UBI = communism which didn't work in the specific instance of the soviet union" and on the other side "opposing UBI = oligarch".
And that in turn, would drive the economics of building robots to replace the people because the people are so expensive.
- $UNPLEASANT_JOB is costing too much! Let us start making robots
- Let us continue to bear the cost of paying $UNPLEASANT_JOB a high wage for the decade+ it takes to develop the automation for that task.
Nope, here is what will happen:
- $UNPLEASANT_JOB is costing too much! Let us figure out how to automate this task. In the meanwhile, let us dump the wages for this role. Otherwise, our company closes down.
- 10-15 years later, the same automation needs to be cheaper than the dumped wage for it to be feasible, which is a completely different challenge. First of all, the automation has to be cheaper than your "high enough wage", which is more than you can say for robotics products today.
We've seen this play out before. We know how this goes.
But I agree UBI is not the final solution. The final solution involves stuff like abolishing wage labor, circular economies, non-transferable labor-time tokens and democractic management.