It’s not the purpose of the economy, it’s the purpose of civilization.
What makes us different than most types of animals is that we’re capable of supporting the less fortunate members of our species even through life-threatening situations.
What makes us different than most types of animals is that we’re capable of supporting the less fortunate members of our species even through life-threatening situations.
But don't assume it's without its own controversy. Maybe the point of civilization is to allow people to help eachother by providing safeguards against treachery.
Maybe they should be forced to help eachother under threat of violence. There's a massive spectrum of "solutions" between those two, and UBI could be considered pretty close to forcing, depending on how it's implemented.
It's not pedantry or technicalities, a lasting system needs to benefit people and support / build shared principles. Ideally it'd support the principles that enabled it in the first place.
Now we are going to see if there is a limit or not. Or if AI changes the game (the dystopian end game is a small amount of people controlling all the production and getting rid of the rest by one way or another)
(if you live in places with healthy worker protections, a company can't just fire someone, they need reasonable grounds; bar that, they need to first try and place them somewhere else in the company, and if that doesn't work, firing involves paying a severance fee. In an ideal and morally correct situation anyway, in practice they'll use dodgy corporate structures to bankrupt companies before paying or retraining anyone)
Another optimistic look is that there might just be more work, that otherwise would not be done.
For example we always complain about AAA games coming out riddled with bugs, now we have an opportunity to cut a significant portion of that if we also keep the workforce. Same with administrative tasks that take forever because it’s one person filing it for the whole country etc.