14 ms·

Machine Money and People Money

77 points by runesoerensen 10y ago

known 10y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiemgauer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiemgauer is alternative to UBI
- damptowel 10y ago
  Bernard Lietaer has written a lot on complementary currencies, such as the one above. His basic point is to have a heterogeneous money market, as opposed to the current monoculture. Every currency needs to fulfill a social goal, or number of those, and the complementary (not "alternative") currencies can by designed to act countercyclical to the dominant currency, attenuating the business cycle (he notes the Swiss "Wir" Bank as a good example of that). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Lietaer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Lietaer
negamax 10y ago
Universal basic infrastructure is what we need a push towards. Next to free energy, education, medicine.
- atemerev 10y ago
  There was a country with all these things already implemented. Education was free on all levels, medicine too, nearly free energy and infrastructure. This utopian place was called the "USSR". And all was rosy and shiny there.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    There is a perception, common across pretty much the entire US political spectrum, that we have nothing to learn from the history of the Soviet Union, and no reason to fear any similarity of outcome. I won't comment on the origins of this perception, or its accuracy. I'll just say I sure do hope it turns out to be correct.
  - negamax 10y ago
    You misunderstand me. I meant in terms of technology making them cheaper. Like online courses by major universities, open medicinal formulas (within reason). Investment and maintainence of roads etc by robotics
thedlade 10y ago
I think legislations should be brought in to prevent machines from taking over most of people's jobs but just a percentage in different sectors. With human nature, UBI is never going to work, it is just over-glorified welfare.
vminkov 10y ago
Guys, most people commenting here are having at least 2x the avg income of their home country and are dangerously wrong about the motivations and the right incentives for the poor. You are shooting yourselves and the economy in the leg if you give everybody a UBI. People need to be given incentives to become more productive and that's the only right path in the world's prosperity. One day when automation reaches that state of the art form, everybody will have lots of food, energy and shelter not because they are GIVEN for free, but because they are PRODUCED almost for free - because of technology and competition. We can reach that state if we focus our efforts in those essential areas and the government can help by providing incentives and (maybe) cheaper credit to the venture funds in those areas. P.S. I have been raised in a post-commie country in a poor family and have gone through the path of breaking out of poverty. I have received lots of "free" stuff and welfare along the way, both for nothing and for the promise of educating myself. The first is dead wrong, the second is the deal breaker to me.
- atemerev 10y ago
  This. We Russians understand that. Maybe also people of Cuba, Venezuela or those lucky few who managed to escape from North Korea. UBI is totalitarian BS.
  - visarga 10y ago
    I fear the state will provide a too low UBI and people will be very poor. There will be very little to differentiate people because no matter what they do, they get the same income. The person becomes a dependent upon the state and is at the mercy of the current crop of politicians. This problem can be viewed from a different angle: not to make the state a distributor of UBI collected from taxes, but to empower each community to own the resources necessary to generate their income and be essentially self-reliant. So there would be no need for help from the state. As robots become available to do the work currently done by humans, each community / city / country will have to develop and operate its own fleet. So the profits should not be concentrated in the Google of the robotics era, but distributed to everyone by empowering them to be self reliant. 3D printing and renewable energy are going to be important for achieving self reliance.
apatters 10y ago
As it happens I'm reading this piece from Savannakhet, Laos PDR. No disrespect to Tim but when you spend time in places like Savannakhet, it's easy to see just how detached from the reality of the world population some of these self-proclaimed "alpha geek" futurists really are. A few points I take issue with: 1) Like Keynes before him, O'Reilly misses the point that the majority of the world's population doesn't participate in open, free, or global markets. They are permitted limited access to local markets by oligarchs, who rarely grant that access out of benevolence, and maintain enough military and police power to revoke it if necessary. This is probably the single biggest reason that poor countries stay poor. Technology hasn't solved this problem because it's political. The article doesn't consider it. 2) Tim thinks that more automation is going to change the world. And of course it has already changed the developed world and will change it even more. But in much of the world, the labor of many people can be had for very very cheap. When you can hire an unlimited number of people for a few dollars a day, which in many developing economies is easy, there is little incentive to automate. In fact there is a disincentive -- you would rather keep everyone working because unemployment leads to unrest. So subsistence economies, developing countries with big rural and agricultural economies plus a big workforce -- they are not automating and have no interest in doing so. The pace at which these places change will remain slow. 3) The article touches on our great struggle ahead to overcome climate change -- as these articles written by humanity's great thinkers always do nowadays. But as the economies under these oligarchs develop, how will we convince them to do climate-friendly things when it would increase the price they pay for energy and slow their rate of growth? Climate studies alone won't do it -- some combination of political pressure and the direct economic impact of climate change might, but they will fight it hard. All this is not really a refutation of the article, which makes plenty of valid points -- but it also makes these rosy predictions about the whole world being rich and automated in two generations' time, which makes sense if you're talking to tech heads all day, but totally ignores the non-tech realities that dictate the lives of most of humanity. The future is not evenly distributed, and the future future will probably be even more uneven.
k__ 10y ago
Universal Basic Education is what we need. It should be possible for everyone at any age to aquire every skill.
- reustle 10y ago
  Isn't that roughly what we have already? Half of my day though high school was spent at a tech school learning programming and networking, for free. Kids were learning dental, medical, carpentry, electrical, automotive, etc.
  - k__ 10y ago
    Not for people who didn't have good education and lost their 10 years job to automation.
- wyager 10y ago
  This is called the Internet.
  - bkmartin 10y ago
    You cannot learn to work a physical piece of equipment on the internet no matter how amazing the quality of video. Some things just take physical practice. I don't want a phlebotomist that has an online degree...
brenschluss 10y ago
The notion that premium money is paid for 'authenticity' and 'creativity' is a laughable misreading of current marketing tactics. More like: branded 'creativity' is a way to create artificial scarcity through market segmentation, to create goods that don't easily compete with each other. That's why people can drink 'artisanal coffee' for $5/cup and a Dunkin Donuts for $1/cup and not feel ripped off even if one store is next to another. To take this at face value and to think about "Creativity money" is to be completely ignorant about the human labor in creating things that are "not Creative". That Dunkin Donuts coffee, your underwear, a television, a utilitarian tool, anything in the 'basics' were all made with some amalgamation of human labor and machines/tools. So sure, machines get cheaper, human labor doesn't. So everything is a mix of things that get cheaper and and things that don't. "Creativity" has nothing to do with a human vs. machine money issue and just muddles the conversation.
- visarga 10y ago
  It's not like creativity is the sole domain of humans. AI is becoming more and more creative, too. There are AI systems that paint, compose, play games and music, dance and even write poetry. They are evolving rapidly. Much of the creativity of the future will come from machines, or teams of human and machine.
  - brenschluss 10y ago
    You miss my point exactly. "Creativity" is a marketing myth because it divides the world into 'Creative' and 'not-Creative' disciplines. Anecdata: Most of the artists I know hate the word.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      > Anecdata: Most of the artists I know hate the word. Not surprising, since most of the "creative" work has nothing to do with creativity. You don't have much room for creative expression when you're paid to paint UIs or make magazine layouts or make cheap landscapes for sale. The artists I know say that creativity doesn't pay the bills; it's something they'd love to do, but struggle to have time/means for.
js8 10y ago
Machine Money, aka why use a simple solution when we can have a complicated one? Ahh, humans.. :-) Machine Money, compared to Universal Basic Income, will require lot of government regulation regarding classification of what is produced by machines and humans and at what cost. Although I am sure, figuring all this out will create a lot of jobs.
wearenotfooled 10y ago
UBI is a scheme to create even more suckers working super hard to give 20% of their income to sharing economy oligarchs
- bkmartin 10y ago
  I think that is rather cynical. I think that UBI is an attempt by some to solve a problem that society has had a very hard time dealing with. How do you make sure everyone's needs are provided for while also keeping them incentivized to be productive members of society so that there are enough people creating real value in the world to keep it all in motion. The struggle of poverty is real, I've lived it and seen it first hand. The solutions are certainly more complex than UBI (as if that would be simple). This discussion is paved with good intentions, even if you disagree with what the outcomes will be.
jondubois 10y ago
Separating currencies into machine money and people money won't make any difference - People will just create exchanges on which they will be able to trade between the two and it will basically reach an equilibrium - Same as before, except more complicated (and more wasteful). The real solution to inequality is to introduce a tax on capital holdings. The more assets are owned by an entity in terms of total dollar value, the higher the tax bracket should be. You could have 0% tax per year for asset holdings below $1 million and the % would progressively increase to 100% tax for companies with a capital worth of $10 trillion or above. That would make sure that corporations don't get too big and will encourage people to invest their money in smaller companies. This would also encourage large corporations to break themselves up into smaller parts (to avoid taxes) - But that will be a good thing, there will be more CEO/executive jobs available and it would be more interesting for investors since they will now be able to be more selective about which specific parts of a previously huge corporation you want to invest in and stock price would move independenty. Extremely wealthy individuals (billionaires) will be incentivized to give away large parts of their wealth to charity in order to reduce their taxes down and bring their asset holdings to an equilibrium. This policy needs to be enforced globally (E.g. a UN resolution/international treaty) to avoid flight of capital. But I think even with flight of capital factored in, countries that enforce this tax will be much better off economically due to the massive inefficiencies of large corporations.
- thomasahle 10y ago
  As you say, tax should be asymptotic. Something like "You keep $a n^b$ of what you earn", for some b < 1. For example, say you keep n^.9, then a 40% pay increase will be a 36% increase after tax. No worries about what tax brackets you may be in or be about to enter. This way the 'tax percentage' naturally converges from 0% for people who earn little, to 100% for people who earn a lot. While still basically letting everyone have asymptoticly all their money. Hell, even paying n(1-1/logn) would make more sense than what we have now.
- Ntrails 10y ago
  I will never understand why people think answers to things like this are simple and can be resolved with a single magic bullet sans unintended consequence. > This policy needs to be enforced globally (E.g. a UN resolution/international treaty) to avoid flight of capital. The UN does not have the mandate to impose tax laws on independent nations. If it did, you have to re-write the entire legal framework countries to deal with pensions, trusts etc. Oh, and that's before you find interesting new kinds of charities being set up in various domiciles with different laws for qualification... So we now need to impose our version of those laws too. Basically your solution is to have a global dictatorship where everyone does what you say, which is for their own good anyway - because your vision of what is right and proper is the only valid one. We're going to impose these laws and we're going to back it up with this Gun borrowed from the UN. Democratic governments controlling their own tax laws? Psssh. Sod that eh? And since we have this power, let's get everyone on the same page in some other important things. Police powers, information gathering and sharing, biometrics, so on and so forth. It's for the best right? >But I think even with flight of capital factored in, countries that enforce this tax will be much better off economically due to the massive inefficiencies of large corporations. What inefficiencies are these? All you've now done is move all the money off shore, and agreed to collect less tax because the subsidiary in your country has no assets to tax. They're all leased. No profits are made due to IP costs going to offshore companies (or a million subsidiaries or some other soln that doesn't involve paying stupid tax rates).
weddpros 10y ago
France already has something that smells a lot like UBI, except it's not Universal (RSA). France also has free education and health. Now if you judge by the numbers, it's not really a success: high unemployment and low people satisfaction... plus even higher expectations about "the State". Administration is huge, costs a lot, and imposes a very rigid barrier between people and "the State": it's a country of bureaucrats. Employers and businesses are designated as "ennemies" in peoples minds, and the USA represents the ultimate Boss in the game. In addition to RSA, France has every social benefits you can imagine... because RSA can't adjust to each situation: disabled? single mother? 6 kids? tough job? So if you want to imagine your country with UBI, study France first. Then ask yourself if you'd like your country to be even more like France than France itself. A country where equality is the buzz word, and Liberty is totally absent of every speech. I made the decision to leave this country because what I have in mind for my life is not 5 kids with no job... I want to work, to innovate, to create value for people, and France was making it much harder to achieve. But they have RSA and strikes. Their choice. I do understand it sounds romantic to an american, just like USSR always sounded romantic to french people.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Good you bring up. I guess France should be studied as a potential failure mode of UBI, but I don't think it torpedoes the idea itself. > I want to work, to innovate, to create value for people, and France was making it much harder to achieve. But they have RSA and strikes. Their choice. I want to work too. Just not have a job :). Creating value for people is not equal to having a job or a company, and while most of the value is indeed created this way, I'd also wager that most jobs and companies are not really creating any value. I'd like to avoid participation in bullshit economy to the extent possible. > I do understand it sounds romantic to an american, just like USSR always sounded romantic to french people. Yeah, USSR sounded romantic to a lot of Western intellectuals during the entire XX century, up until the late stages of Cold War[0][1]. That said, for me - and I guess for many others - UBI is not like Soviet Union. UBI is like United Federation of Planets. [0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-of-wasted-time/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-... [1] - Though the socialist revolutions didn't start out of the blue; the sentiment came in big part from continued abuse inflicted on workers by capital owners, and you can probably thank those events for having sane working conditions today. All the safety nets we enjoy (and try to destroy) today were paid for in blood by our great-{n} grandparents.
hamilyon2 10y ago
I always thought that there in fact is two or more kinds of money, but for another reason. It is strange that we pay for irreplacable natural resources with same money which we pay for easily copyable information.
- bksenior 10y ago
  Why? Demand is demand. It doesn't care where or what it is demanding.
riprowan 10y ago
Why Milton Friedman supported guaranteed basic income: https://medium.com/basic-income/why-milton-friedman-supported-a-guaranteed-income-5-reasons-da6e628f6070#.jo2utxhf6 https://medium.com/basic-income/why-milton-friedman-supporte... Most people are shocked to hear that Friedman held these views.
phkahler 10y ago
There's a contradiction here. If the machine money is taxed and redistributed, but the cost of the items produced by the machines is exponentially going to zero... Your revenue source for UBI is going away unless they artificially keep the price of those goods up. If you just let the price of machine produced goods approach zero, then everyone benefits from the lower cost of stuff. I have yet to see a mathematical analysis of UBI, just hand waving.
bawana 10y ago
Money was a fungible proxy for stuff people made/harvested/gathered. The first distortion was its use on speculation/investment/insurance- in a word, finance. These instruments allowed value to change in the absence of supply/demand of the real product they represent. Markets were invented for these instruments. And ‘financial’ money now dwarfs all other kinds of money. Take forex for example. We need to restore the purpose of money as a tool for living. Financial money should only be used for real transactions. Not more finance. And not transactions with machines either(machine money). As we revalue humans this way, our lives will return to balance.
mindslight 10y ago
I suspect essays like this one will come to be viewed as leading indicators of the ultimate failure of Keynesian economics. Hopefully within a few decades, rather than a century. The chief economic problem we face today, disempowering the middle class [0] and keeping them working full-bore, is the creation of rent. UBI seems like a solution because it proposes to alleviate some of this rent - but in an urban area (in-demand housing), housing rent [1] will just increase to eat up the UBI. This will further cement the divide between urban rat racers and rural poverty. What we need is sound money - an end to this 45-year policy of forcing inflation. In a sane technological economy, the price of goods and services should trend decreasing - after all, price is the metric by which an economy optimizes. Technology has become so powerful that the decreases are still somewhat occurring for many things, leaving anything that can be financialized (and thus used to conjure new money) shooting through the roof to keep the average increasing. If the middle class actually had a place to save [2], their marginal utility for each dollar would drop and they would gain negotiating power (liquid savings creates runway), letting them naturally demand higher compensation or lower working hours. [0] The term is a bit overused, but for a good reason - sustainability. Only a few can ever be upper class, by definition. And the lower class does not see their own situation as desirable. [1] Including both money directly paid to landlords, as well as rent payed to banks based on valuations only constrained by said rent. [2] As opposed to be fleeced by the Wall St bubble casino over passive "investments".

77 points by runesoerensen 10y ago

known 10y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiemgauer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiemgauer is alternative to UBI

damptowel 10y ago
Bernard Lietaer has written a lot on complementary currencies, such as the one above. His basic point is to have a heterogeneous money market, as opposed to the current monoculture. Every currency needs to fulfill a social goal, or number of those, and the complementary (not "alternative") currencies can by designed to act countercyclical to the dominant currency, attenuating the business cycle (he notes the Swiss "Wir" Bank as a good example of that). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Lietaer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Lietaer

negamax 10y ago

Universal basic infrastructure is what we need a push towards. Next to free energy, education, medicine.

atemerev 10y ago
There was a country with all these things already implemented. Education was free on all levels, medicine too, nearly free energy and infrastructure. This utopian place was called the "USSR". And all was rosy and shiny there.
- throwanem 10y ago
  There is a perception, common across pretty much the entire US political spectrum, that we have nothing to learn from the history of the Soviet Union, and no reason to fear any similarity of outcome. I won't comment on the origins of this perception, or its accuracy. I'll just say I sure do hope it turns out to be correct.
- negamax 10y ago
  You misunderstand me. I meant in terms of technology making them cheaper. Like online courses by major universities, open medicinal formulas (within reason). Investment and maintainence of roads etc by robotics

thedlade 10y ago

I think legislations should be brought in to prevent machines from taking over most of people's jobs but just a percentage in different sectors. With human nature, UBI is never going to work, it is just over-glorified welfare.

vminkov 10y ago

Guys, most people commenting here are having at least 2x the avg income of their home country and are dangerously wrong about the motivations and the right incentives for the poor. You are shooting yourselves and the economy in the leg if you give everybody a UBI. People need to be given incentives to become more productive and that's the only right path in the world's prosperity. One day when automation reaches that state of the art form, everybody will have lots of food, energy and shelter not because they are GIVEN for free, but because they are PRODUCED almost for free - because of technology and competition. We can reach that state if we focus our efforts in those essential areas and the government can help by providing incentives and (maybe) cheaper credit to the venture funds in those areas. P.S. I have been raised in a post-commie country in a poor family and have gone through the path of breaking out of poverty. I have received lots of "free" stuff and welfare along the way, both for nothing and for the promise of educating myself. The first is dead wrong, the second is the deal breaker to me.

atemerev 10y ago
This. We Russians understand that. Maybe also people of Cuba, Venezuela or those lucky few who managed to escape from North Korea. UBI is totalitarian BS.
- visarga 10y ago
  I fear the state will provide a too low UBI and people will be very poor. There will be very little to differentiate people because no matter what they do, they get the same income. The person becomes a dependent upon the state and is at the mercy of the current crop of politicians. This problem can be viewed from a different angle: not to make the state a distributor of UBI collected from taxes, but to empower each community to own the resources necessary to generate their income and be essentially self-reliant. So there would be no need for help from the state. As robots become available to do the work currently done by humans, each community / city / country will have to develop and operate its own fleet. So the profits should not be concentrated in the Google of the robotics era, but distributed to everyone by empowering them to be self reliant. 3D printing and renewable energy are going to be important for achieving self reliance.

apatters 10y ago

As it happens I'm reading this piece from Savannakhet, Laos PDR. No disrespect to Tim but when you spend time in places like Savannakhet, it's easy to see just how detached from the reality of the world population some of these self-proclaimed "alpha geek" futurists really are. A few points I take issue with: 1) Like Keynes before him, O'Reilly misses the point that the majority of the world's population doesn't participate in open, free, or global markets. They are permitted limited access to local markets by oligarchs, who rarely grant that access out of benevolence, and maintain enough military and police power to revoke it if necessary. This is probably the single biggest reason that poor countries stay poor. Technology hasn't solved this problem because it's political. The article doesn't consider it. 2) Tim thinks that more automation is going to change the world. And of course it has already changed the developed world and will change it even more. But in much of the world, the labor of many people can be had for very very cheap. When you can hire an unlimited number of people for a few dollars a day, which in many developing economies is easy, there is little incentive to automate. In fact there is a disincentive -- you would rather keep everyone working because unemployment leads to unrest. So subsistence economies, developing countries with big rural and agricultural economies plus a big workforce -- they are not automating and have no interest in doing so. The pace at which these places change will remain slow. 3) The article touches on our great struggle ahead to overcome climate change -- as these articles written by humanity's great thinkers always do nowadays. But as the economies under these oligarchs develop, how will we convince them to do climate-friendly things when it would increase the price they pay for energy and slow their rate of growth? Climate studies alone won't do it -- some combination of political pressure and the direct economic impact of climate change might, but they will fight it hard. All this is not really a refutation of the article, which makes plenty of valid points -- but it also makes these rosy predictions about the whole world being rich and automated in two generations' time, which makes sense if you're talking to tech heads all day, but totally ignores the non-tech realities that dictate the lives of most of humanity. The future is not evenly distributed, and the future future will probably be even more uneven.

k__ 10y ago

Universal Basic Education is what we need. It should be possible for everyone at any age to aquire every skill.

reustle 10y ago
Isn't that roughly what we have already? Half of my day though high school was spent at a tech school learning programming and networking, for free. Kids were learning dental, medical, carpentry, electrical, automotive, etc.
- k__ 10y ago
  Not for people who didn't have good education and lost their 10 years job to automation.
wyager 10y ago
This is called the Internet.
- bkmartin 10y ago
  You cannot learn to work a physical piece of equipment on the internet no matter how amazing the quality of video. Some things just take physical practice. I don't want a phlebotomist that has an online degree...

brenschluss 10y ago

The notion that premium money is paid for 'authenticity' and 'creativity' is a laughable misreading of current marketing tactics. More like: branded 'creativity' is a way to create artificial scarcity through market segmentation, to create goods that don't easily compete with each other. That's why people can drink 'artisanal coffee' for $5/cup and a Dunkin Donuts for $1/cup and not feel ripped off even if one store is next to another. To take this at face value and to think about "Creativity money" is to be completely ignorant about the human labor in creating things that are "not Creative". That Dunkin Donuts coffee, your underwear, a television, a utilitarian tool, anything in the 'basics' were all made with some amalgamation of human labor and machines/tools. So sure, machines get cheaper, human labor doesn't. So everything is a mix of things that get cheaper and and things that don't. "Creativity" has nothing to do with a human vs. machine money issue and just muddles the conversation.

visarga 10y ago
It's not like creativity is the sole domain of humans. AI is becoming more and more creative, too. There are AI systems that paint, compose, play games and music, dance and even write poetry. They are evolving rapidly. Much of the creativity of the future will come from machines, or teams of human and machine.
- brenschluss 10y ago
  You miss my point exactly. "Creativity" is a marketing myth because it divides the world into 'Creative' and 'not-Creative' disciplines. Anecdata: Most of the artists I know hate the word.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > Anecdata: Most of the artists I know hate the word. Not surprising, since most of the "creative" work has nothing to do with creativity. You don't have much room for creative expression when you're paid to paint UIs or make magazine layouts or make cheap landscapes for sale. The artists I know say that creativity doesn't pay the bills; it's something they'd love to do, but struggle to have time/means for.

js8 10y ago

Machine Money, aka why use a simple solution when we can have a complicated one? Ahh, humans.. :-) Machine Money, compared to Universal Basic Income, will require lot of government regulation regarding classification of what is produced by machines and humans and at what cost. Although I am sure, figuring all this out will create a lot of jobs.

wearenotfooled 10y ago

UBI is a scheme to create even more suckers working super hard to give 20% of their income to sharing economy oligarchs

bkmartin 10y ago
I think that is rather cynical. I think that UBI is an attempt by some to solve a problem that society has had a very hard time dealing with. How do you make sure everyone's needs are provided for while also keeping them incentivized to be productive members of society so that there are enough people creating real value in the world to keep it all in motion. The struggle of poverty is real, I've lived it and seen it first hand. The solutions are certainly more complex than UBI (as if that would be simple). This discussion is paved with good intentions, even if you disagree with what the outcomes will be.

jondubois 10y ago

Separating currencies into machine money and people money won't make any difference - People will just create exchanges on which they will be able to trade between the two and it will basically reach an equilibrium - Same as before, except more complicated (and more wasteful). The real solution to inequality is to introduce a tax on capital holdings. The more assets are owned by an entity in terms of total dollar value, the higher the tax bracket should be. You could have 0% tax per year for asset holdings below $1 million and the % would progressively increase to 100% tax for companies with a capital worth of $10 trillion or above. That would make sure that corporations don't get too big and will encourage people to invest their money in smaller companies. This would also encourage large corporations to break themselves up into smaller parts (to avoid taxes) - But that will be a good thing, there will be more CEO/executive jobs available and it would be more interesting for investors since they will now be able to be more selective about which specific parts of a previously huge corporation you want to invest in and stock price would move independenty. Extremely wealthy individuals (billionaires) will be incentivized to give away large parts of their wealth to charity in order to reduce their taxes down and bring their asset holdings to an equilibrium. This policy needs to be enforced globally (E.g. a UN resolution/international treaty) to avoid flight of capital. But I think even with flight of capital factored in, countries that enforce this tax will be much better off economically due to the massive inefficiencies of large corporations.

thomasahle 10y ago
As you say, tax should be asymptotic. Something like "You keep $a n^b$ of what you earn", for some b < 1. For example, say you keep n^.9, then a 40% pay increase will be a 36% increase after tax. No worries about what tax brackets you may be in or be about to enter. This way the 'tax percentage' naturally converges from 0% for people who earn little, to 100% for people who earn a lot. While still basically letting everyone have asymptoticly all their money. Hell, even paying n(1-1/logn) would make more sense than what we have now.
Ntrails 10y ago
I will never understand why people think answers to things like this are simple and can be resolved with a single magic bullet sans unintended consequence. > This policy needs to be enforced globally (E.g. a UN resolution/international treaty) to avoid flight of capital. The UN does not have the mandate to impose tax laws on independent nations. If it did, you have to re-write the entire legal framework countries to deal with pensions, trusts etc. Oh, and that's before you find interesting new kinds of charities being set up in various domiciles with different laws for qualification... So we now need to impose our version of those laws too. Basically your solution is to have a global dictatorship where everyone does what you say, which is for their own good anyway - because your vision of what is right and proper is the only valid one. We're going to impose these laws and we're going to back it up with this Gun borrowed from the UN. Democratic governments controlling their own tax laws? Psssh. Sod that eh? And since we have this power, let's get everyone on the same page in some other important things. Police powers, information gathering and sharing, biometrics, so on and so forth. It's for the best right? >But I think even with flight of capital factored in, countries that enforce this tax will be much better off economically due to the massive inefficiencies of large corporations. What inefficiencies are these? All you've now done is move all the money off shore, and agreed to collect less tax because the subsidiary in your country has no assets to tax. They're all leased. No profits are made due to IP costs going to offshore companies (or a million subsidiaries or some other soln that doesn't involve paying stupid tax rates).

weddpros 10y ago

France already has something that smells a lot like UBI, except it's not Universal (RSA). France also has free education and health. Now if you judge by the numbers, it's not really a success: high unemployment and low people satisfaction... plus even higher expectations about "the State". Administration is huge, costs a lot, and imposes a very rigid barrier between people and "the State": it's a country of bureaucrats. Employers and businesses are designated as "ennemies" in peoples minds, and the USA represents the ultimate Boss in the game. In addition to RSA, France has every social benefits you can imagine... because RSA can't adjust to each situation: disabled? single mother? 6 kids? tough job? So if you want to imagine your country with UBI, study France first. Then ask yourself if you'd like your country to be even more like France than France itself. A country where equality is the buzz word, and Liberty is totally absent of every speech. I made the decision to leave this country because what I have in mind for my life is not 5 kids with no job... I want to work, to innovate, to create value for people, and France was making it much harder to achieve. But they have RSA and strikes. Their choice. I do understand it sounds romantic to an american, just like USSR always sounded romantic to french people.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
Good you bring up. I guess France should be studied as a potential failure mode of UBI, but I don't think it torpedoes the idea itself. > I want to work, to innovate, to create value for people, and France was making it much harder to achieve. But they have RSA and strikes. Their choice. I want to work too. Just not have a job :). Creating value for people is not equal to having a job or a company, and while most of the value is indeed created this way, I'd also wager that most jobs and companies are not really creating any value. I'd like to avoid participation in bullshit economy to the extent possible. > I do understand it sounds romantic to an american, just like USSR always sounded romantic to french people. Yeah, USSR sounded romantic to a lot of Western intellectuals during the entire XX century, up until the late stages of Cold War[0][1]. That said, for me - and I guess for many others - UBI is not like Soviet Union. UBI is like United Federation of Planets. [0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-of-wasted-time/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-... [1] - Though the socialist revolutions didn't start out of the blue; the sentiment came in big part from continued abuse inflicted on workers by capital owners, and you can probably thank those events for having sane working conditions today. All the safety nets we enjoy (and try to destroy) today were paid for in blood by our great-{n} grandparents.

hamilyon2 10y ago

I always thought that there in fact is two or more kinds of money, but for another reason. It is strange that we pay for irreplacable natural resources with same money which we pay for easily copyable information.

bksenior 10y ago
Why? Demand is demand. It doesn't care where or what it is demanding.

riprowan 10y ago

Why Milton Friedman supported guaranteed basic income: https://medium.com/basic-income/why-milton-friedman-supported-a-guaranteed-income-5-reasons-da6e628f6070#.jo2utxhf6 https://medium.com/basic-income/why-milton-friedman-supporte... Most people are shocked to hear that Friedman held these views.

phkahler 10y ago

There's a contradiction here. If the machine money is taxed and redistributed, but the cost of the items produced by the machines is exponentially going to zero... Your revenue source for UBI is going away unless they artificially keep the price of those goods up. If you just let the price of machine produced goods approach zero, then everyone benefits from the lower cost of stuff. I have yet to see a mathematical analysis of UBI, just hand waving.

bawana 10y ago

Money was a fungible proxy for stuff people made/harvested/gathered. The first distortion was its use on speculation/investment/insurance- in a word, finance. These instruments allowed value to change in the absence of supply/demand of the real product they represent. Markets were invented for these instruments. And ‘financial’ money now dwarfs all other kinds of money. Take forex for example. We need to restore the purpose of money as a tool for living. Financial money should only be used for real transactions. Not more finance. And not transactions with machines either(machine money). As we revalue humans this way, our lives will return to balance.

mindslight 10y ago

I suspect essays like this one will come to be viewed as leading indicators of the ultimate failure of Keynesian economics. Hopefully within a few decades, rather than a century. The chief economic problem we face today, disempowering the middle class [0] and keeping them working full-bore, is the creation of rent. UBI seems like a solution because it proposes to alleviate some of this rent - but in an urban area (in-demand housing), housing rent [1] will just increase to eat up the UBI. This will further cement the divide between urban rat racers and rural poverty. What we need is sound money - an end to this 45-year policy of forcing inflation. In a sane technological economy, the price of goods and services should trend decreasing - after all, price is the metric by which an economy optimizes. Technology has become so powerful that the decreases are still somewhat occurring for many things, leaving anything that can be financialized (and thus used to conjure new money) shooting through the roof to keep the average increasing. If the middle class actually had a place to save [2], their marginal utility for each dollar would drop and they would gain negotiating power (liquid savings creates runway), letting them naturally demand higher compensation or lower working hours. [0] The term is a bit overused, but for a good reason - sustainability. Only a few can ever be upper class, by definition. And the lower class does not see their own situation as desirable. [1] Including both money directly paid to landlords, as well as rent payed to banks based on valuations only constrained by said rent. [2] As opposed to be fleeced by the Wall St bubble casino over passive "investments".