The anti-freeloader impulse is one of the easiest ways to spur people to action. Would that go away or be intensified under UBI?
would people cease to be charitable after a tragedy because they expect UBI to handle it?
Look at France, it seems like the biggest protests now are when it is suggested their retirement program is unsustainable and they should phase in a higher retirement age. And these programs across the west are becoming unsustainable because retirement ages were set decades ago at levels 0-10 years below life expectancy, and that gap has now grown to 20 years with a lower employed:retired ratio.
One of the benefits of status being associated with making money is that it tends to drive positive-sum productive behavior rather than zero-sum destructive behavior.
With infinite welfare, the dominant culture will be the one that is able to reproduce as much as possible, perhaps through cloning? We are already seeing IVF, surrogate mothers and other sorts of cloning/eugenics sexual strategies emerge, just not on a dominant level yet.
If it wasn't for cloning, I would say it would look more like Calhoun's rat utopia due to sex-based competition.
>The anti-freeloader impulse is one of the easiest ways to spur people to action.
I would say this depends on culture. Only industrious countries tend to have culture with this impulse.
If “infinite welfare” unavoidably led to a reproductive feedback loop, the richest, safest societies would already be there, which we don’t see.
Your comment seems to rest on the unstated assumption that hierarchy between humans is an essential stabilizing force, and that abundance without it is unsustainable. I don’t think that’s an empirically settled conclusion.
When you just have one guy cloning himself with government subsidy, there are totally different dynamics at play.
The system of UBI changes the incentives to create this behavior. I am not even saying it is rat-like; In my previous comment I discussed the differences between our world and the rat utopia. In the rat utopia, reproduction is still limited by the interplay of sexes and you eventually get failure of the system through a breakdown of reproduction. It would be more accurate to describe the most successful strategy under UBI as "tumor-like", where the failure mode is based on a strain in resources.
The richest, safest societies don't have infinite welfare because they have cemented a culture which rejects welfare, and reproduction is currently limited by either culture (women's expectations of their partners) OR resources (look at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-chinese-billionaire... or what elon is doing). What happens when reproduction is limited by neither? We already see the effects of this in say, Africa where you have a massive population explosion caused by aid.
No, it doesn’t. You’re just assuming this is the case because it destabilizes the hierarchy you’re implicitly attached to.
Notice the pattern: women’s preferences are just artificial constraints, meaning and agency are hand waved away, and what’s left is a simplistic model of mindless replicators constrained only by available resources. The dynamics of human society reduced to that of E. coli. This is not how reality works.
This sort of fixation on “reproductive greed” mirrors market fundamentalism. Human behavior is collapsed into a single maximization drive which is circularly declared a law of nature.
> We already see the effects of this in say, Africa where you have a massive population explosion caused by aid.
The Africa example is a perfect example of post-hoc rationalization. You take complex demographic dynamics and use them to selectively justify a prior belief of “free resources cause collapse” rather than letting the data inform your priors. In reality fertility is much better explained by declining infant mortality, low female education, and labor incentives.
Humans don't reproduce like e. coli, but in a UBI world that is the kind of human you are artificially selecting for. Ordinarily, bacteria aren't antibiotic-resistant, but exposure to antibiotics generation-over-generation changes them.
Show me the incentives, and I will show you the man they create. Like it or not, Humans are animals. We have the same primal motivations as other animals, just a more complex expression of those motivations. I think you focus on the details of that expression to lose the big picture, which is incongruent for your personal desires of being free from material constraints.
Life, like art, is defined by constraints. The meaning of our lives is to heroically struggle against them until we fail. To remove the constraints is to denature mankind. The process of evolution is nessisarially actuated through suffering. We naturally struggle against constraints like hunger, disease, and so on in an individual scale because this is what gives us meaning. But it would be a mistake to overcome these on a systematic scale, as it would rid of us of meaning. The future you propose is mankind wireheading itself.
You never articulate why reproduction would become the dominant axis of selection, except by assuming it from the start. People empirically do not behave that way when material constraints are relaxed.
> the process of evolution is necessarily actuated through suffering
That’s a quasi-religious claim. At that point you’re no longer arguing “this will happen,” but rather “this must not happen,” because abundance threatens a worldview where hierarchy and enforced struggle are what give life meaning. That’s not “the big picture,” it’s your big picture.
Look at the last thousand years. We’ve removed famine, plague, illiteracy, and constant violence, once considered inevitable and essential to discipline and social order. Society didn’t collapse into meaningless each time those went away; we simply gained more freedom to choose for ourselves what gives life meaning.
Here's Orwell speaking on the whole thing:
> "An argument that Socialists ought to be prepared to meet, since it is brought up constantly both by Christian apologists and by neo-pessimists such as James Burnham, is the alleged immutability of ‘human nature’. Socialists are accused—I think without justification—of assuming that Man is perfectible, and it is then pointed out that human history is in fact one long tale of greed, robbery and oppression. Man, it is said, will always try to get the better of his neighbour, he will always hog as much property as possible for himself and his family. Man is of his nature sinful, and cannot be made virtuous by Act of Parliament. Therefore, though economic exploitation can be controlled to some extent, the classless society is for ever impossible.
> "The proper answer, it seems to me, is that this argument belongs to the Stone Age. It presupposes that material goods will always be desperately scarce. The power hunger of human beings does indeed present a serious problem, but there is no reason for thinking that the greed for mere wealth is a permanent human characteristic. We are selfish in economic matters because we all live in terror of poverty. But when a commodity is not scarce, no one tries to grab more than his fair share of it. No one tries to make a corner in air, for instance. The millionaire as well as the beggar is content with just so much air as he can breathe. Or, again, water. In this country we are not troubled by lack of water. If anything we have too much of it, especially on Bank Holidays. As a result water hardly enters into our consciousness. Yet in dried-up countries like North Africa, what jealousies, what hatreds, what appalling crimes the lack of water can cause! So also with any other kind of goods. If they were made plentiful, as they so easily might be, there is no reason to think that the supposed acquisitive instincts of the human being could not be bred out in a couple of generations. And after all, if human nature never changes, why is it that we not only don’t practise cannibalism any longer, but don’t even want to?"
How would this be bred out without artificially controlling reproduction? What is the action here? The idea that individual pressure for resources would trickle down inter-generationally is lamarckian!
Under a regime of UBI and Reproductive "Freedom", the most successful genes will simply be the ones that choose to reproduce the most, because there are no longer any social or resource limitations on reproduction. You get a totally opposite effect, where the reproductively greediest are the most successful at reproduction. It is a tragedy of the commons.
I would describe the current state of disaster, where reproduction is limited by sexual competition and not by resources as similar calhoun's rat utopia. In the western world, it is also driven by market factors such as land ownership and cultural expectations around that. Whereas in china there are population limits resulting from the one-child policy (anti-malthusian policy). I maintain that my position in my previous comment is true in the large despite these local effects.
In countries where you have a welfare system, you tend to see new strategies emerge after a couple of generations. In the USA, a significant number of african-american households are dependent on EBT. In Israel, the population of "Haredi" ultra-orthodox subgroup is subsidized and has grown year over year (https://youtu.be/ST_eZwBIMDA). I suggest that it is largely a social effect, because it is effected by the rate of cultural diffusion between the welfare/reproduction maximizing subgroup and the broader society. But it still represents an adaptation.
"Charity" for the wealthy is really nothing to do with charity. It's a social-climbing game and part of a coordinated PR/media campaign. Charity will get you into rooms with people with true wealth and power far easier than anything else you can do.
Not all UBIs are created equal. Broadly speaking, there are left-wing and right-wing forms of UBI.
The left-wing UBI is a form of wealth redistribution to reduce extreme wealth inequality. It means giving people enough to meet their needs and have a basic quality of life. This probably won't work if the rest of society remains the same. For example, consider military personnel. If you don't live in barracks you get BAH. Landlords around a base know this so will always know what to charge. Increase the BAH and the rents go up. You would likely have similar problems with UBI unless you also solve the supply of these kinds of needs as well.
The right-wing form of UBI is simply an excuse to destroy the social welfare state and social safety net. Proponents will argue it's more efficient to simply replace everything like disability pensions, food stamps, Medicaid, etc with a UBI payment and letting people twist in the wind of private sector providers for everything.
That might make sense but, for example, living with a disability makes everything more expensive and you might have few or no options for work. We also allow disabled people to get paid sub-minimum wage as yet another form of exploitation.
As another example, we allow employers to pay below a living wage them SNAP benefits, which is twofold corporate welfare. It reduces Walmart's labor costs AND they end up spending SNAP at Walmart. And then we make political decisions about what they can spend SNAP on.
So it's a likely outcome that any right-wing UBI implementation will end up deciding what you can and can't spend money on.