The Primordial Credit Argument for Unconditional Basic Income (UBI)
scottsantens.substack.com
scottsantens.substack.com
Original sin reinvented.
>The message of UBI, stripped of the fiscal jargon, is one sentence: “I trust you.” I trust that if I give you what you need to live, you will use it to live. I trust that you do not need a caseworker checking up on you. I trust that you do not need to prove you are looking for work. I trust that you do not need to be poor enough or sick enough or pathetic enough to deserve it. You are a human being. You exist. That is sufficient.
Altruism is a poor strategy in the 'real world'. One look at the digital domain and we conclude zero trust is a strong strategy for dealing with humans in that abstracted world. The idea of large, high trust societies is a very 1st-world concept, anyhow.
>UBI pilots have been run, with real money, in real countries, with real measurements. The consistent finding across more than a decade of evidence is that giving people unconditional cash makes them happier and healthier, and the mechanisms by which it does so map closely onto the argument I’ve just made.
UBI arguments end in cinders, no? We still argue over tiny time-limited pilots as the model for civilization at scale. This time, the avenue is moral superiority, but we haven't changed any of the facts of human nature, such as the free rider problem going unsolved.
Employers have to make the argument "we're better than sitting at home wanking all day."
This WILL cause widescale economic realignment. I expect all the telemarketers will walk out the second the economic gun is removed from their foreheads. But conversely, you might see people enterring fields that are structurally vital but historically undercompensated once rent and student loans are off the table. How many quants would rather be teaching long division to 10-year-olds?
If you have a service you can't emotionally convince people to take with a low discretionary-income-only salary, you'll just have to offer larger and larger cheques to attract them, or find a way to do without. Maybe you have 30 people applying to be CEO at $1 per year because they have BIG VISIONS to build, but the burger flippers are suddenly making $120k per year to keep them on. It will force a grand reckoning of what actually delivers the value in a society.
Another interesting point might be the end of "continuity" of employment-- if you're not two paychecks from starvation, you might see people enterring and leaving positions on a short term basis. This could reduce burnout or just encourage more specialization-- working for a firm just for the duration of the project where your skills matter, or just long enough to afford a 5090.
Or we could consider some sort of mandate-- drafting people into the workforce for their UBI. Then it becomes a political selling point to minimize how much of this is necessary to actually keep the wheels turning. That's the data I'd personally love to see. Once we eliminate non-productive work or redundancy that exists for commercial purposes, could we be averaging 20 hours a week?
Who's making the stuff that everyone who opts out of working wants to buy? We tried UBI during C19 without everyone and we got massive inflation - $100k in 2020 money requires $125k today.
I get the quants want to teach math as alphas while gammas like me are to be drafted for the mines, but that makes UBI sound just like an anti-capitalist revolution for revenge.
Think of the pretty marketing videos of automated disassembly lines that extract valuable materials from scrap, and the practical reality of paying people in the Global South pennies per hour to do it.
Once the cheap option is off the table, the last mile effort to close out some of those industries gets moonshot efforts. This also breaks some of the prisoner's-dilemma problems with early automation-- if your cost basis is higher because you're first to automate, you lose, but if everyone goes together, they all have the same cost risks and you probably unlock the economies of scale you couldn't get alone.