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Comment by dostick | Hacker News Reader

UBI is the inevitable future. We are now living in a time period in history when we wait for government bureaucrats to finally realise that UBI is a right and not a privilege. At this moment more than half of employment can be classified as “bullshit jobs” - inconsequential that would make no difference if they disappeared one day, created to satisfy the requirements of the capitalist economy. We have been productive to feed and shelter everyone for free for a while now, at least 20 years if not more, but the scarcity narrative gets reignited and pushed by politicians who want to distract and blame immigrants or lack of resources for their own incompetence.

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UBI is inherently inflationary and as far as I can tell there's no solution to that problem.

Inflation isn't a bad thing if everyone particpates in it. The world of hoarding is passe in UBI world.

That’s a misleading generalisation. Yes, it appears like an inflation vector, then if you follow the money it’s not that simple. In a closed utopian town system of 100 people that would cause inflation, in the real world -no.

UBI funded through LVT is not inflationary.

Indeed. As I see it (and I have lived in socialist and capitalist countries as well as developing countries) there are really only two problems. 1. People in power don't want the system to change because it's a threat to their position. 2. People with low education and no means to support their own kids keep having large families.

We can solve #1 by just vetoing the current government and replacing it. But #2 is difficult to solve because we should not be comfortable imposing reproductive control on humans from the government. So popular education may be a good thing to focus on: lower birth rate, lower problems, higher productivity.

Aren’t birth rates already at a historical low in most parts of the world?

It's a global thing; most of those countries look to immigration to solve their depopulation problem. Education needs to be global. I guess LLMs do that now in many ways; we don't necessarily need formal education systems everywhere. The issue with doing a local import of foreign immigrants is it only lasts one generation: when the next generation grow up poor but with local education, face the job market and comprehend how much it costs to have kids, they (generally, mostly, compared to their parents) decide not to. These issues tend to be systemic, and there's more of them: breakdown in community, normalization of corruption or self-interest and normalization of technocratic surveillance nanny statism seem to be definite parallel trends right now. They're not blame the immigrant type problems. They're inertia of capitalism meets waves of technology shift type problems.

Basically we should stop being assholes to people in poor countries and treat them as equals. This would go a long way to solving many problems in the world.

As I see it #1 is the real problem. People whose sense of self worth is intimately tied to having authority over others don’t take kindly to it being threatened, and have many tools at their disposal to punish those who try.

As for #2, as salient as the intro sequence to Idiocracy was, it seems like the only thing I’m hearing about recently is how far under the population replacement rate all developed countries already are. If we can set aside the tribalism long enough to start seeing them as our (society’s) kids, then it just becomes another distribution / investment problem being blocked by #1 (corrupt extractive leadership)

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