Hacker News Reader

Comment by augment_me | Hacker News Reader

UBI as a concept does not add up. It assumes an even production of all goods that people might need, but there isn't, you are giving everyone fiat currency that is not inherently tied to any physical good. Very fast you will descend into either plan economy where you get food stamps, or an economy where people are trading goods that are actually tied to value.

For example, you go to the store to get eggs, since everyone has UBI, they decide to also get eggs, the eggs either run out, or the store raises the price, at which either you will get food queues like in the USSR, or everyone will need more UBI to afford eggs. The solution to this is to increase egg production, but this is not instant, and not necessarily a priority, while money transfers are instant.

View on HN

I'm no economist but here is how I think of it. In an ideal world let's assume every worker is replaced by one AI / robot that is an exact clone of them. Then let's say there is an ideal government that taxes all the income each person's clone makes and hands it directly to them. In such an economy nothing would change, things would go on as they always have.

Now some will be unlucky and end up with a clone that makes them way less than average. So to fix this the salaries of all the clones are put into one pot and redistributed as "UBI". Given the wealth disparity, most people would end up better off than before, the high earners of the past will be a bit worse off though.

But of course we are not in a perfect world, in reality there are many inefficiencies, and no company would accept a 100% AI worker tax. However, these AIs are presumably not just our clones, but 100x better. So we are in a position of abundance not scarcity. There's enough eggs for everyone. It becomes a question of distribution and policy

Where do you live? Do all houseowners get kicked out of their homes? Do you raze all houses and build similar apartments and resettle people? If not, there will be inequalities. How does someone who is born into a shit house at a polluted street move up to a nice house in a forest? You still need full control and acceptance of inequality from all sides.

There's a bunch of quite good speculation like this in Plan A

https://ai-2040.com/supplements/economics-of-plan-a

And yes, moved into skyscrapers:

"This implies that the price of housing will become dominated by the price of the land (as opposed to the cost of building housing), so dense housing (e.g. skyscrapers) will become relatively much cheaper than sparse housing"

There's a later bit that talks about keeping earth as a reserve too.

I want to see the political climate and situation that lead up to a decision like this. Like, if you just go off basic human desires, politics, the amount of money invested in outcome D, and how previous global events are handled. Humans are reactive and not proactive, similar concept can be seen with climate change, terrorist attacks, financial crashes, etc, shit has to get really bad before a decision to change is made.

From the site, I think the most realistic outcome is Plan D and then eventually Plan C when people start freaking out. I dont see any path where you get even close to Plan A.

So either lay out how Plan A is supposed to happen in the population, or revise the answer.

> It assumes an even production of all goods that people might need, but there isn't, you are giving everyone fiat currency that is not inherently tied to any physical good.

Is what you're saying that since UBI would disconnect someone's production from their income, then this will cause shortages of goods? I think UBI only works if the income generated by it is tied to production. That production would not be generated by human labor, but instead by robot labor. I think if you disconnect that then the system would not work, but why would you need to?

There is really a more fundamental problem related to housing/real estate.

You can't arbitrage the real estate market to add to your UBI savings by living on the street.

Maybe a tougher problem is any solution here would have to collapse real estate prices nationally. You would have to undo the massive inequality that the real estate market would represent at the start of UBI. You would have to ban the owning of more than one home and have a force liquidation for the people owning second homes. Whatever is attempted would create all kinds of loopholes that would just be gamed unless now we are talking about all apartment buildings being government ran.

Any time UBI comes up the economic discussion is just so hopelessly naive. It isn't even at the level of homo economicus stupidity. It is the level of a teenager who has read that back of Capital at Barnes and Noble then thought about solutions after stopping at the dispensary.

Without a workforce there is no consumption, and therefore capitalism cannot exist. Yes, we would require a planned economy. Call it communism or whatever you like, but free market economics literally cannot exist in such an environment.

Capitalism is based on two simple, fundamental assumptions about the world:

- everyone works

- everyone consumes

1. Turned out not to be true. We have disabled people, elderly people. We patch it with legislation like SSI. That only works because everyone else is still working.

Our monkey patch solutions have held up well for a long time. But, if either of those two assumptions are broken in a large way, the entire system collapses. UBI is yet another monkey patch. As you know, it won’t hold if we bend the invariants of the system enough.

Eventually, a fully planned economy will not be optional.

Try to convince the majority of the western world that are consuming the equal of 4-6 globes that they are eligible for:

(1) National Park visit a year (3) RoboTaxi rides this week (2) Eggs for the week

Who will do the planning? Why would the population accept this planning?

You will in practice need full surveillance and control of your population and an agreement between every country that this is how we are going to do things.

At that point you can also ask the question what value humans provide at all. Why upkeep all of this when you can just expand compute, perform resource extraction instead of managing your cattle.

There will be a workforce, it just won't be human-based. Capitalism has always existed without 100% employment, in every example someone needs to work to support others who cannot. Humans have done this under capitalism to support their families and communities, but now we will need to find incentives for robots to do this. It might be as simple as just telling them.

Right but then the robots would produce wealth, but they cannot own it. So you need to redistribute the wealth. Which is, decidedly, not capitalism.

A little bit of wealth distribution exists within American capitalism, through monkey-patches like I mentioned. But full wealth distribution is a new economic system altogether.

Right I guess that was your main point. This would be a pivot away from capitalism. But it’s unclear what would be a capitalism-based proposal which addresses the issues. Has anyone seriously proposed one?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com