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Comment by uhwhat | Hacker News Reader

I imagine partitioning living NEEDS [housing, food, transportation] as an area of the economy with its own money/token/basic-income-credits system separate from the WANT economy of everything else.

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Maybe, but there's strong evidence (from the field of macroeconomics) that allowing people to just receive money (rather than payments in kind) makes them even better off. Although you may fret about people using the money for bad things, in reality mostly they don't, but they are better at allocating resources than a central planner. Think of it this way, to the citizen who actually wants to be better off, would you rather be able to cut your spending in order to make a smart investment or not be able to do so?

They can also better fit their own needs. Maybe a smaller worse shelter wouldn't be an issue for them, but they would much prefer to have warmer clothing (smaller and warmer in comparison to peers in the same location). Maybe they forgo milk to buy even more lentils.

The problem is the intractable dispute about what things should go into which category. Empirically, there has been a strong historical tendency to move things into the "NEED" category that were traditionally in the "WANT" category.

For example, indoor plumbing was considered a grossly extravagant luxury for almost all of human history. Within the last hundred years, the richer societies have made laws (building codes) that have switched it to a "NEED". The same thing happend with indoor heating systems.

As for food, most medieval European peasants considered themselves lucky if they got a bowl of thin gruel every day. Asian peasants thought they were lucky to get a bowl of rice. Many didn't get anything on many days. Now in the US the government is talking about "food deserts" and shifting many previously "luxury" fresh nutritious foods into the "NEED" category.

>For example, indoor plumbing was considered a grossly extravagant luxury for almost all of human history. Within the last hundred years, the richer societies have made laws (building codes) that have switched it to a "NEED". The same thing happend with indoor heating systems.

Yes, we rather do like preventing dysentery, bubonic plague, and flu epidemics. Public health is indeed a necessity rather than a luxury.

This is precisely my point. For almost all of human history, public health was indeed a luxury rather than a necessity. In many parts of the world, it still is today.

The details of a specific proposal are not relevant. No matter what specific items you choose for these categories, eventually people will want things you say are "extravagant luxuries" and call them "needs".

Progress will always shift things from "WANT" to "NEED".

If you want to play that game living past your 30's is a "WANT" rather than a "NEED". You probably won't find many people who think this particular "WANT" isn't a "NEED".

"Progress" is a nebulous and heavily opinion-based concept. It is not a well defined factual, monotonic process whereby society invariably moves from "bad old ways" to "better new ways".

This is not a game, and I'm not arguing the merits of any specific proposals. It's an empirical analysis of what has actually happened in world history.

Things you think are "needs" today were considered extravagant luxuries for almost all of history, and many of the things you personally view as luxuries will be called "needs" by others. Thus, the parent comment's plan to divide the economy into "wants" and "needs" is not tractable, since these categories are both shifting through time and also heavily disputed from one person to the next at any given point in time.

I am not arguing in favor of this arrangement. I'm pointing out that that's simply the way it actually is, regardless of our personal preferences or judgements of the situation.

What if items from the WANT category are moved to the NEED category when either 1 of 2 things are met. It's empirically shown to improve the health of the owners. Or it's possible to create the item for everyone on earth, meaning we have the resources/manufacturing without harming the biosphere.

With these 2 rules we should see a steady increase in QoL for everyone.

The main problem with the whole idea is that it is inevitable that an exchange rate will be set and they will be traded. What does a NEED collector do with the collected NEED currency?

I've thought about this, too but I can't figure out how you'd prevent those tokens from being bartered for more traditional currency outside of the necessary conversion by landlords and grocers and other providers.

With ubiquitous computing now available to everyone we might be able to fully track that sub set of transactions with 'currency with state and history' as opposed to traditional 'dumb dollars' but I think it would be a hard problem getting it to play nice with the traditional currency economy.

It won't. The more industrious will barter at a gain while others will barter at a loss. Consider food stamps. Some will trade them $2 of stamps for $1 of cash. But others will buy food, cook and then sell the food, bringing in $2 dollars of cash for $1 of stamps.

Food stamps are a decent example. It's not perfect yes, but it basically becomes undesirable to trade the cash of the WANT economy for the goods of the NEEDs economy.

Is physical intimacy (no, this doesn't mean sex, though that is one form) a want or a need? Consider the mortality rate of infants who receive no physical touch but have all their classical needs met compared to infants who are held and cared for.

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