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Comment by motorcycleman9 | Hacker News Reader

To me, it seems like man's constant fight against the brutality of mother nature will never end. As long as we need food, need medicine, and entropy destroys what we create, we will need a lot of people working to solve problems.

Any conception of basic income where we can freely give out $2000 a month to everyone has a net present value roughly equal to giving each person a lump sum payment of $500,000. There's not enough wealth in the world to sustain it.

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Sure, give someone 500k and they might try to buy some luxury goods and inflate prices of various things. Give someone enough to not be destitute on a monthly basis and you’ll have a huge boon to the economy - because they’ll buy the essentials. People will always want more than just the basics and thus work.

Money is not equal to wealth, money is a device. That's the first and most common mistake in economics. UBI is a way to reshuffe the cards of modern economy and hope that'll fix some of the current problems. It certainly won't allow everyone to drive a Ferrari.

As is often the case in economics, the scarcity is not an absolute lack of resources, but a result of inefficient allocation.

The world's mean income is about $18000 adjusted for purchasing power parity so it's not a complete stretch to get to $2000 per month for the whole world https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17512040

The USA has a mean income of about $72,000 so in theory UBI could be $6000/mo without bankrupting the country.

It would be very interesting to see what kind of crazy spending-led boom you could achieve by redistributing wealth exactly evenly across every American citizen.

The mean income has no relevance on how much UBI can be issued.

I don't understand what you mean by this. UBI redistributes income - wouldn't it obviously be funded via taxation? USA would be able to afford a much higher UBI than Sierra Leone would because US income is higher. What determines how much UBI can be issued if aggregate income is irrelevant?

If you fund by a 100% income tax, everyone would quit instantly. There would literally be no point in working for money. UBI cannot be funded by the thing UBI would eliminate.

man isn’t fighting the brutality of nature. man is struggling to overcome the brutality of man.

nature is what we are. life is a beautiful struggle of a dance when we exist within that flow.

There is if we have robots

American households own $98 trillion in net worth. Averages to about $340,000 per person. And this is just household wealth. So yes there is enough money out there.

the only wealth that isn't "household wealth" is public assets. I guess there might technically be enough to give everyone $500k (or $2000/month), but do you want the government to provide any services?

$2000 per month is with wealth right now. It will be more than affordable in the future since the country will have more wealth in the future. Pretty much everything in current economics relies on wealth growth (pension funds, 401ks, etc), so adding this into that mix is very reasonable.

the relationship between the two figures is that $2000/month is roughly the safe withdrawal rate for diverse $500k portfolio (ie, the most you can spend without risking that you use up the principal over several decades). if you use the almost all the returns from the nation's capital to pay out $2000/month, there isn't much growth to speak of. of course, it's sort of a naive analysis to treat a nation's wealth like a retirement account, but the idea clearly doesn't pass the "back of the napkin" test. there would have to be some powerful knock-on effects to make it halfway viable.

Growth where? If you "pay out" returns from the nation's wealth to its own citizens, the wealth still stays inside the nation and wealth growth still happens.

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