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‘Utopia for Realists?’ – a review

110 points by llovan 10y ago

mehrzad 10y ago
If we want UBI, why not go full communalism or anarcho-collectivism?
- fapjacks 10y ago
  Because capitalism is a phenomenal economic tool?
- panic 10y ago
  The free market seems to work pretty well for people with money. The idea of UBI is to give everyone money so it works well for everyone. Is there evidence that these alternatives will do any better?
  - orangecat 10y ago
    The free market seems to work pretty well for people with money. The idea of UBI is to give everyone money so it works well for everyone. I'm totally stealing that line.
- Daishiman 10y ago
  Because you still want an effective market economy; you just don't want people dying and suffering because of it.
- StanislavPetrov 10y ago
  Because systems based on pure ideology don't work well in reality. Its the whole idea behind implementing a UBI in our quasi-free-market capitalist system. The larger point is that not only is the idea of a UBI decent and moral, because nobody should worry about being homeless or starving in a rich society, but because its much cheaper the the alternative! Only someone completely blinded by ideology (or somehow profiting off of the existing system) would argue that its better to spend $50,000 dollars a year per homeless person to manage shelters and run a bureaucracy if simply giving that homeless person $25,000 a year and achieves a better overall result.
  - caloni 10y ago
    If there's only both alternatives, that's right. There's at least another one: spend zero. And don't forget that, after all win the minimum, that's the new zero.
  - notahacker 10y ago
    > but because its much cheaper the the alternative But it isn't. A fifth of the UK working age population, for example, is neither registered as unemployed or earning money. Most of them aren't homeless, or entitled to disability benefits and aren't registered as unemployed because for whatever reason they don't need the money. All of them would be eligible for basic income. You can afford to provide much better support for homeless people (many of whose bigger problems cannot be addressed simply by providing them with a regular income) if your budget isn't being stretched by the need to subsidise the perceived basic needs of huge numbers of content people that aren't actually interested in claiming subsidies.
    - vlehto 10y ago
      It's likely they are mostly students or enjoy some kind of disability benefit. You can tax their parents and give the students UBI. The sick will cost anyhow. Or you can exclude students from UBI, that's what you are doing now. I'm not against either.
- MawNicker 10y ago
  Lol. This sort of statement is often made by people who don't want UBI. "Its just communism/socialism/etc." No its not. Its penance for an otherwise ruthless and unrepentant capitalism which has successfully undermined the value of human labor. Its an invitation to join in on the modern world and an alternative to the paternal condescension which is presently favored. Without it most people will be left to become blatant wage slaves or worse. If we transition to a world where the majority are regularly humiliated and made to feel they're responsible for their own disenfranchisement I suspect I'll end up killing myself. I can't watch it anymore. I didn't succeed because I worked hard. I succeeded because I happened to be smart and I won't be made into an annecdote in support of a system that would have otherwise fucked me. Anyone with the capacity to succeed will readily pay for it via "hard work." It's the people without that capacity that are so "lazy." They literally have no way in which to better themselves. Not in this society. Capitalistic motivation is good and UBI preserves it. But eventually it's only good for a few and we need a solution for everyone else.
  - thwarted 10y ago
    Lol. This sort of statement is often made by people who don't want UBI. "Its just communism/socialism/etc." No its not. Its penance for an otherwise ruthless and unrepentant capitalism which has successfully undermined the value of human labor. While there's no denying that capitalism can be ruthless and unrepentant, and what we have for capitalism currently actually is that, calling the progress of capitalism "ruthless" and "unrepentant" is just as loaded as calling UBI communism/socialism/etc, and leads to needlessly heated debates and ideological headbutting. It fails to convince anyone of anything. Even if capitalism isn't ruthless and unrepentant, the value of human labor goes down, and isn't necessarily undermined, when capitalism seeks efficiency. There is no strict requirement that capitalism be ruthless and unrepentant—those are, in fact, human traits that are impossible to apply to the unthinking and unfeeling system that is capitalism. When capitalism replaces human labor with machines, it isn't to undermine the value of human labor, it's to be more efficient. Ultimately, the result is the same, as you describe: humans are unable to exploit their labor for even basic living. But calling out capitalism as some kind of evil hydra that explicitly sets out to destroy the lives and livelihood of the working class is unproductive. That is an unfortunate side effect of capitalism, and of capitalism gaining increased prominence during an age when human labor itself had high intrinsic value but was also relatively abundant. It is a side effect which must be addressed. I find it much more effective to couch UBI in terms of the end result of capitalism: it makes no sense for a capitalistic system to use relatively inefficient humans to do work that machines can do faster and cheaper. To ensure and give inefficient humans jobs that capitalism could otherwise find ways to do sounds more like a socialist makework ideal than UBI does. It is actually in capitalism's best interest to pay people to stay out the areas where they can not perform tasks as well as machines can. This frees up people to find other avenues of contribution, perhaps finding further efficiencies, without using up all their time and energy leveraging their faculties purely to stay alive.
mc32 10y ago
I vote for testing this out in Canada or Mexico first (let them have first dibs on these fantastic ideas.) Have them open their borders give everyone local and newcomer a basic income a fifteen hour workweek and if it all works out after a trial period, we can join their enviable party --they'll let us in, right? Addendum. There seems to be a contradiction in the message, on the one hand people in developed economies make too much money (traded in time for more money to buy things they don't need nor actually want -they claim) but at the same time it's "unfair" they make 3-times what a comparable Bolivian makes (but cut our hours by two thirds) So it kind of reads as if they'd like to turn Bolivians into a consumerist society too, but they kind of trash consumerism ("neither need nor want").
- fiatmoney 10y ago
  Much like communism, it will turn out never to have been tried after all.
  - rjeli 10y ago
    "After globalization and basic income, is this it? Have we achieved full utopia?" "Oh no, things are gonna get a lot worse."
    - vinay427 10y ago
      I'm really not sure what point you're making here. Could you elaborate?
      - GauntletWizard 10y ago
        It's a joke, famously told by Reagan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8EstTUq0lo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8EstTUq0lo
  - elcapitan 10y ago
    No True Scotsman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
_wo6a 10y ago
So, formalizing the existing arrangement?
gburt 10y ago
How do supporters of the UBI deal with the real estate valuation problem? It seems that assets that are highly immobile and have elasticity that is directly proportional to income would eat up all or almost all of the transfer. It is possible that there is a counterbalancing effect of people being able to live outside of the big city, but I still suspect a form of "minimum rent" would arise in the case there was a UBI and the whole transfer would end up consolidating with a few landlords.
- mc32 10y ago
  Maybe you make UBI an income guarantee rather than a right to live in a given place guarantee. In such a structure the state could incentivize moving to areas which are losing population, such as Midwestern rustbelt cities and towns in the US, or any place not the MDF in MX or the Ruhr valley in DE, etc.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    Any remotely rational policy would not try to adjust subsidies to enable living in luxury locations. No, you're not going to be able to live in San Francisco. You'll be able to (barely) afford a crappy apartment in Detroit.
  - kylebgorman 10y ago
    I don't think we should incentivize moving to such places unless we plan to also (somehow) massively increase the opportunities available in such places.
    - mc32 10y ago
      Isn't the whole idea of UBI that it's subsidizing the lack of good jobs for people who for one reason or another can't land decent jobs? I don't see why someone who isn't being overly productive also needs to live in a location where one could use more productive people. In other words if a mill worker's site shutdown and this person now depends solely on UBI I don't see why they should feel like they should afford some place in the closest big city if they don't get a job since their active addition to productivity is nil. If they get a job then they may or may not afford a place in that city. Still, it's not "owed" anyone.
intrasight 10y ago
UBI has plenty of adherents among sophisticated economists. The 15 hour work week - not so much.
- panic 10y ago
  What are the arguments against it?
  - damptowel 10y ago
    Personally, I worry about overal state productivity and its geopolitical ramifications. Productivity per capita would seem a big determinant in the power a nation has, though this is purely speculation on my part. :)
    - MawNicker 10y ago
      Productivity waxes and wanes. I've experienced hour-long periods in which I accomplished as much as a typical day or week. I suspect a shorter work week would increase the frequency of these occurrences. The perceived relationship between productivity and time needs to die. The true relation is between productivity and "energy." An internal store of productive capacity. The focus on time leads to the continual (and largely wasteful) depletion of energy and eventually to burnout. This state is far more common than you might think. It's rare that an individual experiences the alternative and realizes something is wrong. Most people, rather than complaining or quitting, simply work hard enough not to be fired.
      - varjag 10y ago
        That might be true with your line of work, but certainly doesn't hold for a plumber, teacher or an accountant. You just don't get the week worth of teaching students in an one hour burst. Most of the jobs out there have well defined expected workloads.
        MawNicker 10y ago
bigp3t3 10y ago
I can't be the only one that cringes when reading this site on a landscape 1080p screen...
ZeroGravitas 10y ago
Open borders is interesting because I suspect the vast majority of people do not wish to leave their current vicinity. They only do so to masively improve their lives, but if they could improve their current location that would usually be far preferable. Is there a short catchphrase like "open borders" for "making more places on the globe better places to live”? I feel we spend more time and effort making them worse (fighting wars in them, propping up dictators, bribing local official for access to resources, selling them guns, web filters and other tools of oppression etc
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Is there a short catchphrase like "open borders" for "making more places on the globe better places to live”? The word is "colonialism" and it was moderately successful. But lets not kid ourselves - there were lots of abuses and it was very far from the utopia that I think you wish for. Due to nationalism and a desire to oppress their neighbors, most people would oppose this even if it makes their current vicinity better. Unfortunately this leaves the oppressed locals with no place to go.
Animats 10y ago
It's encouraging that people are thinking about this. We have way too much zero-sum economic effort going on. Most of Wall Street trading and most of advertising are zero-sum. In the near term, there are some obvious moves. The $15 minimum wage. The 8 hour day and 40 hour week. (That means everybody below the 1% gets paid time and a half for overtime, and wage theft is a crime.)
- MrTonyD 10y ago
  Thanks for bringing up the coexistence of zero-sum and non-zero-sum. Too many people talk about them without any real understanding. Just as a time-series can be infinite, it can also be non-infinite at any point in time. People who dismiss things as non-zero-sum don't understand this. Suffering is real - and it is immoral to dismiss it.
- specialist 10y ago
  My game theoretic minded younger self was mightily impressed by Robert Wright's book Non-zero. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonzero:_The_Logic_of_Human_Destiny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonzero:_The_Logic_of_Human_De... Transformed me from an Eeyore into an unrepentant optimist.
DigitalJack 10y ago
Ideas aren't the motor for people. Desire is the motor.
- Natanael_L 10y ago
  Relevant: https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc - "RSA Animate: Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us" Short version: internal motivation is much stronger than external motivation.
  - amelius 10y ago
    What I'm wondering about is what motivates extremely smart people to work on social media apps and iGadgets, when they know that most people care much more about: food, health, a fair economy, energy, and safety. Why are these smart people not working in fundamental physics, or medicine, or why aren't they thinking up new models for the economy?
    - NoGravitas 10y ago
      Social media apps and iGadgets are more profitable. It's almost impossible to get paid for thinking up new models for the economy.
      - amelius 10y ago
        I suspect that autonomy plays an important role here. For writing apps, you need only your computer. You don't have to interact with other people a lot. For medicine, fundamental physics, you need a huge amount of resources, and you need to cooperate with lots of people. It seems that smart people prefer complete independence.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
anovikov 10y ago
That might work but only after curing another evil of our time: the concept of sovereign nation. There must be effective (i.e. not nukes) policing force which may regulate things all around the world. Also, elites must become truly international, not bearing the mentality of any nation.
- samdoidge 10y ago
  Is there any historical situation where destroying this 'evil' has been successful? Getting rid of nukes is not a real world possibility at this time - they are too powerful a tool. These comments are close to being ignorant of reality.
  - anovikov 10y ago
    I don't mean 'get rid of nukes'. I mean 'invent some effective (result much smaller than expenses) way of world policing that doesn't mean nuking bad guys'.
- vlehto 10y ago
  As citizen of nordic country, I would rather kill some people than accept someone taking the independence of my nation. Our politicians are clowns, but they are our clowns. And they care about us lot more than EU clowns or U.S. clowns. So far it looks like bigger countries tend to have less efficient and more corrupt governments. If we make some kind of world government, that might turn incredibly inefficient and corrupt. And now you have absolutely nowhere to run to. If you are US citizen, you can small tasting of your new world order by voting in the next election like some random person over the internet tells you. Are you willing to do that?
  - anovikov 10y ago
    I mean that! That's why it is impossible! Too many people value their nationhood/independence too much. So it is a double-edged sword: if you value your independence and sovereighnity of your country and other countries, you must also accept the fact that most countries are shitty and put their subjects into conditions little short of genocide, while others (like yes Nordic countries) are well-off. It's hard to call that unfair, if you don't allow others to mess with your stuff, nobody can help you avoiding fucking things up.
vlehto 10y ago
"if we’re going to organise for a better world, we need to know who we’re organising against" Most vehemently against UBI are the trade unions. Their existence depends on unemployment being nasty ordeal. If unemployment was OKish, employees would vote with their feet. No unions needed. Next worst is McJobs companies. Minimum wage making unemployment more prevalent and the employed more comfortable is furthering trade union goals like nothing else. These ideas may look the same, but they are completely opposed. "how, for example, can we can open all the borders without eventually replacing countries with a global government?" Nobody can, nor should. Currently somewhat open borders and somewhat good social security is already causing big problems in my country. The easy solution would be UBI for citizens, easy visas for everybody else. Everybody would be better off, except for the people who migrate only to get government benefits. Companies could hire foreign workforce easy, total incoming numbers would stay relatively low, people actually coming from war zones and escaping bullets would find safety. The immigration fear mongers are against this, because solving this problem would end the justification for their existence. Also the left are against this, because they could not run around calling people "fascist" anymore. And the do-gooders would implode, as small numbers of poor third world citizens would keep on being poor, but now they would do it here! It's so nice to have them out of sight.
- tdaltonc 10y ago
  > Also the left are against this, because they could not run around calling people "fascist" anymore. By the same reasoning, you wouldn't like to see a UBI because then you couldn't bash unions or McJobs anymore. Sometimes when people say they want to see something go away, they mean it.
  - vlehto 10y ago
    b-b-but I like unions and McJobs. I just don't like them having too much power. The crux here is that I'm a person. Union member is a person too, many of them probably would genuinely like UBI. As group they would probably not admit they don't like it. But organizations tend follow the incentives of the organization more than they follow opinions of the members.
- 10y ago
james-watson 10y ago
What a hodgepodge of ideas. This is a perfect example of Douglas Hofstadter's chocolate/excrement milkshake. The idea behind Basic Income is to remove government intervention in the economy. Coupled with a flat tax, it massively reduces government overhead and bureaucracy, and leaves government to it's main role as the arbiter of society. Governments' main role is to enforce the rules a society is based upon via the social contract. Collect taxes, enforce laws, and invest in the unprofitable but necessary foundations of civilization (infrastructure, healthcare, research, conservation, etc.) In societies, as in design, less is often more. The more lifelong government bureaucrats we create, the more perverse incentives exist for them to parasitize the government for their own gains. So why do we need to legislate for minimum work hours if we have a sufficient BI? And in what fictional universe does open borders make sense? Human beings are competitive, and we form tribes to compete against one another. This is healthy, and leads to great achievements when properly channeled. The Cold War, for example, caused an era of unprecedented technological innovation. As we enter the post-war era, we already see the downfalls of globalization. When there is no need to compete, decadence sets in. The rich hoard money, and governments refuse to invest in their people's future in the form of infrastructure, research, etc. We need borders, and we need a competitive immigration system that behaves like a sports team manager who is constantly on the lookout to poach talented individuals from competitors. Competition is the quintessential human trait which has brought us to where we are today. Setting it aside has always lead to decadence and downfall.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  You start with a premise that is not universally accepted, even among proponents of the UBI: that the UBI exists to reduce government intervention in the economy (the UBI is a government intervention in the economy, and many UBI proponents support it because it's such an intervention that replaces current interventions premised on a certain labor market model with one that they see as working in a different labor market model they see as emerging with automation, or because they see it as simply more effective than existing and other alternative interventions.) That's not to defend the article, of course.

110 points by llovan 10y ago

mehrzad 10y ago

If we want UBI, why not go full communalism or anarcho-collectivism?

fapjacks 10y ago
Because capitalism is a phenomenal economic tool?
panic 10y ago
The free market seems to work pretty well for people with money. The idea of UBI is to give everyone money so it works well for everyone. Is there evidence that these alternatives will do any better?
- orangecat 10y ago
  The free market seems to work pretty well for people with money. The idea of UBI is to give everyone money so it works well for everyone. I'm totally stealing that line.
Daishiman 10y ago
Because you still want an effective market economy; you just don't want people dying and suffering because of it.
StanislavPetrov 10y ago
Because systems based on pure ideology don't work well in reality. Its the whole idea behind implementing a UBI in our quasi-free-market capitalist system. The larger point is that not only is the idea of a UBI decent and moral, because nobody should worry about being homeless or starving in a rich society, but because its much cheaper the the alternative! Only someone completely blinded by ideology (or somehow profiting off of the existing system) would argue that its better to spend $50,000 dollars a year per homeless person to manage shelters and run a bureaucracy if simply giving that homeless person $25,000 a year and achieves a better overall result.
- caloni 10y ago
  If there's only both alternatives, that's right. There's at least another one: spend zero. And don't forget that, after all win the minimum, that's the new zero.
- notahacker 10y ago
  > but because its much cheaper the the alternative But it isn't. A fifth of the UK working age population, for example, is neither registered as unemployed or earning money. Most of them aren't homeless, or entitled to disability benefits and aren't registered as unemployed because for whatever reason they don't need the money. All of them would be eligible for basic income. You can afford to provide much better support for homeless people (many of whose bigger problems cannot be addressed simply by providing them with a regular income) if your budget isn't being stretched by the need to subsidise the perceived basic needs of huge numbers of content people that aren't actually interested in claiming subsidies.
  - vlehto 10y ago
    It's likely they are mostly students or enjoy some kind of disability benefit. You can tax their parents and give the students UBI. The sick will cost anyhow. Or you can exclude students from UBI, that's what you are doing now. I'm not against either.
MawNicker 10y ago
Lol. This sort of statement is often made by people who don't want UBI. "Its just communism/socialism/etc." No its not. Its penance for an otherwise ruthless and unrepentant capitalism which has successfully undermined the value of human labor. Its an invitation to join in on the modern world and an alternative to the paternal condescension which is presently favored. Without it most people will be left to become blatant wage slaves or worse. If we transition to a world where the majority are regularly humiliated and made to feel they're responsible for their own disenfranchisement I suspect I'll end up killing myself. I can't watch it anymore. I didn't succeed because I worked hard. I succeeded because I happened to be smart and I won't be made into an annecdote in support of a system that would have otherwise fucked me. Anyone with the capacity to succeed will readily pay for it via "hard work." It's the people without that capacity that are so "lazy." They literally have no way in which to better themselves. Not in this society. Capitalistic motivation is good and UBI preserves it. But eventually it's only good for a few and we need a solution for everyone else.
- thwarted 10y ago
  Lol. This sort of statement is often made by people who don't want UBI. "Its just communism/socialism/etc." No its not. Its penance for an otherwise ruthless and unrepentant capitalism which has successfully undermined the value of human labor. While there's no denying that capitalism can be ruthless and unrepentant, and what we have for capitalism currently actually is that, calling the progress of capitalism "ruthless" and "unrepentant" is just as loaded as calling UBI communism/socialism/etc, and leads to needlessly heated debates and ideological headbutting. It fails to convince anyone of anything. Even if capitalism isn't ruthless and unrepentant, the value of human labor goes down, and isn't necessarily undermined, when capitalism seeks efficiency. There is no strict requirement that capitalism be ruthless and unrepentant—those are, in fact, human traits that are impossible to apply to the unthinking and unfeeling system that is capitalism. When capitalism replaces human labor with machines, it isn't to undermine the value of human labor, it's to be more efficient. Ultimately, the result is the same, as you describe: humans are unable to exploit their labor for even basic living. But calling out capitalism as some kind of evil hydra that explicitly sets out to destroy the lives and livelihood of the working class is unproductive. That is an unfortunate side effect of capitalism, and of capitalism gaining increased prominence during an age when human labor itself had high intrinsic value but was also relatively abundant. It is a side effect which must be addressed. I find it much more effective to couch UBI in terms of the end result of capitalism: it makes no sense for a capitalistic system to use relatively inefficient humans to do work that machines can do faster and cheaper. To ensure and give inefficient humans jobs that capitalism could otherwise find ways to do sounds more like a socialist makework ideal than UBI does. It is actually in capitalism's best interest to pay people to stay out the areas where they can not perform tasks as well as machines can. This frees up people to find other avenues of contribution, perhaps finding further efficiencies, without using up all their time and energy leveraging their faculties purely to stay alive.

mc32 10y ago

I vote for testing this out in Canada or Mexico first (let them have first dibs on these fantastic ideas.) Have them open their borders give everyone local and newcomer a basic income a fifteen hour workweek and if it all works out after a trial period, we can join their enviable party --they'll let us in, right? Addendum. There seems to be a contradiction in the message, on the one hand people in developed economies make too much money (traded in time for more money to buy things they don't need nor actually want -they claim) but at the same time it's "unfair" they make 3-times what a comparable Bolivian makes (but cut our hours by two thirds) So it kind of reads as if they'd like to turn Bolivians into a consumerist society too, but they kind of trash consumerism ("neither need nor want").

fiatmoney 10y ago
Much like communism, it will turn out never to have been tried after all.
- rjeli 10y ago
  "After globalization and basic income, is this it? Have we achieved full utopia?" "Oh no, things are gonna get a lot worse."
  - vinay427 10y ago
    I'm really not sure what point you're making here. Could you elaborate?
    - GauntletWizard 10y ago
      It's a joke, famously told by Reagan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8EstTUq0lo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8EstTUq0lo
- elcapitan 10y ago
  No True Scotsman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

_wo6a 10y ago

So, formalizing the existing arrangement?

gburt 10y ago

How do supporters of the UBI deal with the real estate valuation problem? It seems that assets that are highly immobile and have elasticity that is directly proportional to income would eat up all or almost all of the transfer. It is possible that there is a counterbalancing effect of people being able to live outside of the big city, but I still suspect a form of "minimum rent" would arise in the case there was a UBI and the whole transfer would end up consolidating with a few landlords.

mc32 10y ago
Maybe you make UBI an income guarantee rather than a right to live in a given place guarantee. In such a structure the state could incentivize moving to areas which are losing population, such as Midwestern rustbelt cities and towns in the US, or any place not the MDF in MX or the Ruhr valley in DE, etc.
- ghaff 10y ago
  Any remotely rational policy would not try to adjust subsidies to enable living in luxury locations. No, you're not going to be able to live in San Francisco. You'll be able to (barely) afford a crappy apartment in Detroit.
- kylebgorman 10y ago
  I don't think we should incentivize moving to such places unless we plan to also (somehow) massively increase the opportunities available in such places.
  - mc32 10y ago
    Isn't the whole idea of UBI that it's subsidizing the lack of good jobs for people who for one reason or another can't land decent jobs? I don't see why someone who isn't being overly productive also needs to live in a location where one could use more productive people. In other words if a mill worker's site shutdown and this person now depends solely on UBI I don't see why they should feel like they should afford some place in the closest big city if they don't get a job since their active addition to productivity is nil. If they get a job then they may or may not afford a place in that city. Still, it's not "owed" anyone.

intrasight 10y ago

UBI has plenty of adherents among sophisticated economists. The 15 hour work week - not so much.

panic 10y ago
What are the arguments against it?
- damptowel 10y ago
  Personally, I worry about overal state productivity and its geopolitical ramifications. Productivity per capita would seem a big determinant in the power a nation has, though this is purely speculation on my part. :)
  - MawNicker 10y ago
    Productivity waxes and wanes. I've experienced hour-long periods in which I accomplished as much as a typical day or week. I suspect a shorter work week would increase the frequency of these occurrences. The perceived relationship between productivity and time needs to die. The true relation is between productivity and "energy." An internal store of productive capacity. The focus on time leads to the continual (and largely wasteful) depletion of energy and eventually to burnout. This state is far more common than you might think. It's rare that an individual experiences the alternative and realizes something is wrong. Most people, rather than complaining or quitting, simply work hard enough not to be fired.
    - varjag 10y ago
      That might be true with your line of work, but certainly doesn't hold for a plumber, teacher or an accountant. You just don't get the week worth of teaching students in an one hour burst. Most of the jobs out there have well defined expected workloads.
      - MawNicker 10y ago

bigp3t3 10y ago

I can't be the only one that cringes when reading this site on a landscape 1080p screen...

ZeroGravitas 10y ago

Open borders is interesting because I suspect the vast majority of people do not wish to leave their current vicinity. They only do so to masively improve their lives, but if they could improve their current location that would usually be far preferable. Is there a short catchphrase like "open borders" for "making more places on the globe better places to live”? I feel we spend more time and effort making them worse (fighting wars in them, propping up dictators, bribing local official for access to resources, selling them guns, web filters and other tools of oppression etc

yummyfajitas 10y ago
Is there a short catchphrase like "open borders" for "making more places on the globe better places to live”? The word is "colonialism" and it was moderately successful. But lets not kid ourselves - there were lots of abuses and it was very far from the utopia that I think you wish for. Due to nationalism and a desire to oppress their neighbors, most people would oppose this even if it makes their current vicinity better. Unfortunately this leaves the oppressed locals with no place to go.

Animats 10y ago

It's encouraging that people are thinking about this. We have way too much zero-sum economic effort going on. Most of Wall Street trading and most of advertising are zero-sum. In the near term, there are some obvious moves. The $15 minimum wage. The 8 hour day and 40 hour week. (That means everybody below the 1% gets paid time and a half for overtime, and wage theft is a crime.)

MrTonyD 10y ago
Thanks for bringing up the coexistence of zero-sum and non-zero-sum. Too many people talk about them without any real understanding. Just as a time-series can be infinite, it can also be non-infinite at any point in time. People who dismiss things as non-zero-sum don't understand this. Suffering is real - and it is immoral to dismiss it.
specialist 10y ago
My game theoretic minded younger self was mightily impressed by Robert Wright's book Non-zero. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonzero:_The_Logic_of_Human_Destiny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonzero:_The_Logic_of_Human_De... Transformed me from an Eeyore into an unrepentant optimist.

DigitalJack 10y ago

Ideas aren't the motor for people. Desire is the motor.

Natanael_L 10y ago
Relevant: https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc - "RSA Animate: Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us" Short version: internal motivation is much stronger than external motivation.
- amelius 10y ago
  What I'm wondering about is what motivates extremely smart people to work on social media apps and iGadgets, when they know that most people care much more about: food, health, a fair economy, energy, and safety. Why are these smart people not working in fundamental physics, or medicine, or why aren't they thinking up new models for the economy?
  - NoGravitas 10y ago
    Social media apps and iGadgets are more profitable. It's almost impossible to get paid for thinking up new models for the economy.
    - amelius 10y ago
      I suspect that autonomy plays an important role here. For writing apps, you need only your computer. You don't have to interact with other people a lot. For medicine, fundamental physics, you need a huge amount of resources, and you need to cooperate with lots of people. It seems that smart people prefer complete independence.

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anovikov 10y ago

That might work but only after curing another evil of our time: the concept of sovereign nation. There must be effective (i.e. not nukes) policing force which may regulate things all around the world. Also, elites must become truly international, not bearing the mentality of any nation.

samdoidge 10y ago
Is there any historical situation where destroying this 'evil' has been successful? Getting rid of nukes is not a real world possibility at this time - they are too powerful a tool. These comments are close to being ignorant of reality.
- anovikov 10y ago
  I don't mean 'get rid of nukes'. I mean 'invent some effective (result much smaller than expenses) way of world policing that doesn't mean nuking bad guys'.
vlehto 10y ago
As citizen of nordic country, I would rather kill some people than accept someone taking the independence of my nation. Our politicians are clowns, but they are our clowns. And they care about us lot more than EU clowns or U.S. clowns. So far it looks like bigger countries tend to have less efficient and more corrupt governments. If we make some kind of world government, that might turn incredibly inefficient and corrupt. And now you have absolutely nowhere to run to. If you are US citizen, you can small tasting of your new world order by voting in the next election like some random person over the internet tells you. Are you willing to do that?
- anovikov 10y ago
  I mean that! That's why it is impossible! Too many people value their nationhood/independence too much. So it is a double-edged sword: if you value your independence and sovereighnity of your country and other countries, you must also accept the fact that most countries are shitty and put their subjects into conditions little short of genocide, while others (like yes Nordic countries) are well-off. It's hard to call that unfair, if you don't allow others to mess with your stuff, nobody can help you avoiding fucking things up.

vlehto 10y ago

"if we’re going to organise for a better world, we need to know who we’re organising against" Most vehemently against UBI are the trade unions. Their existence depends on unemployment being nasty ordeal. If unemployment was OKish, employees would vote with their feet. No unions needed. Next worst is McJobs companies. Minimum wage making unemployment more prevalent and the employed more comfortable is furthering trade union goals like nothing else. These ideas may look the same, but they are completely opposed. "how, for example, can we can open all the borders without eventually replacing countries with a global government?" Nobody can, nor should. Currently somewhat open borders and somewhat good social security is already causing big problems in my country. The easy solution would be UBI for citizens, easy visas for everybody else. Everybody would be better off, except for the people who migrate only to get government benefits. Companies could hire foreign workforce easy, total incoming numbers would stay relatively low, people actually coming from war zones and escaping bullets would find safety. The immigration fear mongers are against this, because solving this problem would end the justification for their existence. Also the left are against this, because they could not run around calling people "fascist" anymore. And the do-gooders would implode, as small numbers of poor third world citizens would keep on being poor, but now they would do it here! It's so nice to have them out of sight.

tdaltonc 10y ago
> Also the left are against this, because they could not run around calling people "fascist" anymore. By the same reasoning, you wouldn't like to see a UBI because then you couldn't bash unions or McJobs anymore. Sometimes when people say they want to see something go away, they mean it.
- vlehto 10y ago
  b-b-but I like unions and McJobs. I just don't like them having too much power. The crux here is that I'm a person. Union member is a person too, many of them probably would genuinely like UBI. As group they would probably not admit they don't like it. But organizations tend follow the incentives of the organization more than they follow opinions of the members.
10y ago

james-watson 10y ago

What a hodgepodge of ideas. This is a perfect example of Douglas Hofstadter's chocolate/excrement milkshake. The idea behind Basic Income is to remove government intervention in the economy. Coupled with a flat tax, it massively reduces government overhead and bureaucracy, and leaves government to it's main role as the arbiter of society. Governments' main role is to enforce the rules a society is based upon via the social contract. Collect taxes, enforce laws, and invest in the unprofitable but necessary foundations of civilization (infrastructure, healthcare, research, conservation, etc.) In societies, as in design, less is often more. The more lifelong government bureaucrats we create, the more perverse incentives exist for them to parasitize the government for their own gains. So why do we need to legislate for minimum work hours if we have a sufficient BI? And in what fictional universe does open borders make sense? Human beings are competitive, and we form tribes to compete against one another. This is healthy, and leads to great achievements when properly channeled. The Cold War, for example, caused an era of unprecedented technological innovation. As we enter the post-war era, we already see the downfalls of globalization. When there is no need to compete, decadence sets in. The rich hoard money, and governments refuse to invest in their people's future in the form of infrastructure, research, etc. We need borders, and we need a competitive immigration system that behaves like a sports team manager who is constantly on the lookout to poach talented individuals from competitors. Competition is the quintessential human trait which has brought us to where we are today. Setting it aside has always lead to decadence and downfall.

dragonwriter 10y ago
You start with a premise that is not universally accepted, even among proponents of the UBI: that the UBI exists to reduce government intervention in the economy (the UBI is a government intervention in the economy, and many UBI proponents support it because it's such an intervention that replaces current interventions premised on a certain labor market model with one that they see as working in a different labor market model they see as emerging with automation, or because they see it as simply more effective than existing and other alternative interventions.) That's not to defend the article, of course.