Changing My Mind on UBI

geohot.github.io

4 points·therepanic··5 comments

A simple proxy experiment I’ve seen are private torrent trackers.

The ones that have a monthly/weekly/daily free download allowance don’t suddenly deflate the value of “uploaded bytes” across the whole network.

The allowance is enough for someone to bootstrap themselves onto the network by getting some torrents to seed.

UBI should largely be the same? It’s not to replace the incentive of high income, it’s enough to get the basics to live. Trading your time/effort/capital for more income is still incentivised the same way it is now. All the other market effects are still in play.

I don’t understand how Hotz thinks this will suddenly lead to UBI dollars being worthless.

> > I mostly liked Trump’s state of the union

> I don’t understand how Hotz thinks this will suddenly lead to UBI dollars being worthless.

Because he states that he doesn't understand economics. There is no point in debating or really interacting with him.

This is a silly piece that makes a false assumption after false assumption. It's just not the case that UBI creates excess inflation. It can, but in order to do so, it has to be designed in a particular way in a particular economic environment.

This piece of mine gets into the variables to consider:

https://www.scottsantens.com/17-key-variables-that-determine...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_food

In some places you do have a right to food though, I stopped reading this article after that sentence. If I remember two countries rejected the vote to make access to food a basic human right, I'll let people guess which ones.

I was guessing one of them would be Russia or China or something like that. Wasn’t surprised the other one was the US though

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