4 ms·

There are some good points in here. However, what I think the author misses is that we are within reach of a post-scarcity economy, at which point all of those

There are some good points in here. However, what I think the author misses is that we are within reach of a post-scarcity economy, at which point all of those historical economic references go out the window (since nearly all economic theory assumes scarcity). That possibility makes a UBI experiment very worthwhile to me. I don't think we're there today or anything like that, but it may be within our lifetimes that we're seriously approaching post-scarcity. Renewables are getting cheaper, for instance, which may bring about nearly limitless cheap energy. I won't assume mass scale fusion, but we may tackle the energy issue in other ways (this is my handwaving). Food security is already within reach - most of the issues around it are political (meaning kids in Africa aren't starving because we don't have enough food). The main threats are overpopulation and politics, as tech seems to be ticking along quite nicely. I am obviously an optimist, oversimplifying a lot, and believe that we won't nuke ourselves into oblivion. I also think that we'll eventually solve our political problems - many of which are based on energy issues. Even if I'm wrong, though, I don't see an issue with UBI experiments and seeing how it goes. We shouldn't use economic theory as a reason to not try something radically different, as economic theory is wrong often enough to warrant the experiment. It may be worth a look at UBI to look at behavior on a macro level, since I think we're eventually going to get there globally and we'll need to know what the hell to do to occupy ourselves in some way that is still productive in that context.

DanielBMarkham 10y ago
There will be no post-scarcity economy, or rather, if there is one, we're already living in it. People like to trade stuff. This means there will always be things people want to trade. This means money, commerce, and scarcity aren't going anywhere. The post-scarcity folks seem to assume that there is some basic set of things: food, shelter, healthcare ... that once we have, we'll be "done" It's never going to work that way. Let me put this another way. We live in a world with millions, perhaps tens of millions of millionaires. Folks that if they wanted would never have to work again. Do these people stop working? Do they stop accumulating and trading things? Is their participation in the economy so drastically different than others? The poorest person in the U.S. is living a better life than the richest person alive 1,000 years ago. Do they live in any fashion similar to those folks? Would those folks, if they could see 1,000 years into the future, guess at how the common many would behave, given all the things he has? Post scarcity is a nice sentiment, it just doesn't work.
- zaguios 10y ago
  There may not be post scarcity as there will always people the desire more and thus commerce will exist. However that doesn't necessarily means that everyone needs to contribute to that economy. If we have developed the technology to allow for basic food, shelter, and healthcare then people who don't strive for anything more should be able to acquire these things without additional work and become a basic right. In my mind the idea of basic work isn't to stop people from working, it's to stop requiring it for basic livelihood.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  > "People like to trade stuff. This means there will always be things people want to trade. This means money, commerce, and scarcity aren't going anywhere." Sure, there will continue to be trade, but the need/desire to trade will be reduced. To look at how/why, you need to look at decentralised production. Technologies like 3D printers promise to be able to produce many of the products we currently trade for, and this goes beyond the plastic trinkets people currently associate with 3D printers (there are already 3D printer devices in the fields of clothing, food, medicine, heavy machinery, etc...). So whilst there will be trade for the raw materials, why would you pay someone else to make something for you when you have access to a machine to do it for you (note that I said access, not ownership, I don't expect everyone will own a device that can create a car, for example)? It makes sense for people to cut out the middle man when the end result is just as good as they could've gotten by paying a premium. There will still be people wishing to trade for things they can't get for low cost locally, but there will be a lot of industries disrupted by the ability of people to produce their own consumer goods.
- carapace 10y ago
  The point is that our problems are shifting from physical ("How do we eat?") to psychological ("Where shall we have lunch?"). I've heard it said that, "even God hesitates to offer anything but bread to the starving man."
saynsedit 10y ago
Some may argue we are already in a post-scarcity economy. Unfortunately virtual scarcity will persist for some time. This is because the economic system isn't organized enough to distribute all resources fairly and efficiently. As jobs decline (due to increased automation and export), the old way of distributing resources fairly fails, and virtual scarcity will increase. UBI seems like it can fill that gap but I worry that it's an overly simplistic solution. It seems like it can cause runaway inflation without a counter-balance. What prevents rent/food/gas prices from simply going up?
- brokencode 10y ago
  Competition will continue to keep prices down. Just because people have a new source of income, doesn't mean they that will become more likely to buy overpriced goods.
  - justinmk 10y ago
    > Competition will continue to keep prices down That's an incomplete statement, because it doesn't quantify the effect. Will the effect be zero, or will BI be priced-in (higher prices, lower present-value of BI)? US college tuition and housing prices increased dramatically, because of decreased consumer price discrimination driven by low-barrier loans.
  - saynsedit 10y ago
    What will drive the commensurate increase in competition? If competition stays the same, inflation will simply drive prices up.
justinmk 10y ago
> The main threats are overpopulation and politics, as tech seems to be ticking along quite nicely. If [over]population is a factor, then "post-scarcity" is fiction. This makes me think BI advocates are quietly assuming constraints such as "we'll discourage reproduction somehow"--while constantly mentioning how BI will be free of constraints.
- chillwaves 10y ago
  Seems easy enough to give BI to folks who are 18+ and not offer more for kids, or only offer more for the first kid, whatever. There's no reason to give a financial incentive to have more kids, and if you don't the disincentive is already built in (kids cost money). By the way, the issue is not as much population growth as high consumption. What is worse, more people living on basic income or the billions in China and India aspiring to an American middle class lifestyle?
  - justinmk 10y ago
    > Seems easy enough to give BI to folks who are 18+ and not offer more for kids, or only offer more for the first kid, So absence of scarcity will totally be a thing if everything just goes according to plan. Got it.
    - chillwaves 10y ago
      Absence of scarcity is not a result of BI. You have it mixed up. It's the other way around entirely. My response (quoted by you) is merely to counter the urban legend that poor people just like popping out babies to get that sweet government assistance. Alleviating extreme poverty does more to slow population growth than anything else we know so far. Your sarcasm does not contribute to this discussion.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
- SmellTheGlove 10y ago
twisterius 10y ago
What about the environmental impact of chopping down forest to make way for farmland. The impact of billions more traversing the globe and leaving their litter. What about the real scarcity of clean water on this planet, sure we can desalinate the ocean but what will be the unitended consequences of this. What about when we start running out of oxygen when we've destroyed everything else under the vanguard of a human population without scarcity.
Nicolas_Colin 10y ago
I wrote the article. Thank you for your response. I don't think post-scarcity will eat the entire economy anytime soon. In particular, I think that it will still be unaffordable to access proper medical care, child care, and housing. And I don't see how UBI solves that. Hence there are more pressing problems, like deploying a sustainable universal health insurance in the US (either public option or single payer) and reflecting on how we could make housing more affordable so that middle class and working class people can live where the jobs are located.
- makomk 10y ago
  On the contrary, I think that is exactly why post-scarcity is going to devour the economy. Think about what happens when access to medical care and housing become the scarce resources, when it becomes pointless to buy more consumer goods because you have nowhere to put them anyway. More and more of the economy becomes diverted into the pockets of those who own real estate and the medical industry. Improvements in efficiency elsewhere just make the problem worse further damage those industries. An increasing portion of our economy gets siphoned into the pockets of a rentier class with little reason to spend it.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  > "deploying a sustainable universal health insurance in the US (either public option or single payer)" Why involve the insurance companies at all? They're just a drain on the US healthcare system. If you cut out the insurance companies, changed the rules about price gouging in the pharmaceutical industry and engaged in preventative medicine (such as offering support to those who wanted to lose weight), the US could easily afford publicly funded healthcare. Other countries with fewer resources have managed it just fine. Even if you have to raise taxes to do it, you could do so and still leave people with more money in their pocket compared to when they were paying out insurance premiums.
- SmellTheGlove 10y ago
  > I wrote the article. Thank you for your response. I don't think post-scarcity will eat the entire economy anytime soon. In particular, I think that it will still be unaffordable to access proper medical care, child care, and housing. And I don't see how UBI solves that. From a US-centric perspective, those things are true. But the rest of the industrialized world has largely solved access to medical care (even if they are still working on timeliness in some respects). Child care has been solved in parts of the world through a combo of subsidy and parental leave - you can look at parts of Canada and Northern Europe for some models. Housing is tricky - areas are expensive because they're either on the coasts or near major economic hubs. In a post-scarcity economy, there will still be upward pressure on the former, but the latter eases quite a bit. We'll see it sooner than this, though, as tech starts to go more and more remote, and production processes become more and more automated. Not tomorrow, but optimistically, within my childrens' lifetimes. > Hence there are more pressing problems, like deploying a sustainable universal health insurance in the US (either public option or single payer) and reflecting on how we could make housing more affordable so that middle class and working class people can live where the jobs are located. I agree with both of these. Both of these problems have some political solutions, though. They're not technical impossibilities.
WheelsAtLarge 10y ago
Post-scarcity while a nice idea is something that will never be reached. All we have to do is look a Maslow's hierarchy of needs(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs) there are no absolutes there only relatives. You can never fulfill relative needs for all. Here's a very simple example. We can make a very strong argument that we've reached a very high mark on safety. We live in a society that's safer now than ever before. Yet we are constantly scared that the world will come to an end. Politicians and the media have made sure we have something to be scared of. Do all people feel safe? No, yet by all statistics we live in a very safe society. Another one, internet access. Forty years ago, if anyone even mentioned that it needs to be a basic need they would have been laugh at with no mercy. Today, it's not such a ridiculous thought. You say these are really wants. Yes to some but wants are so strong to some(many) that they become basic needs. How many times have you heard some one say,"I need my coffee." Really, coffee is a need? Given this what does post-scarcity really mean? We can define a set of basic needs now but over time they will change and they will grow.
- carapace 10y ago
  Well, that's the question facing us, in the large: Do we create artificial scarcity to keep our bullshit going? Or do we, as a species, learn to relax and stop effing with each other? We had to hit each other with sharp bits of metal for a long time. We don't have to do that anymore. Do we notice or not? Bucky Fuller pointed out that, in terms of our technical ability, post-scarcity arrived in the seventies. We can call it with the invention of the microprocessor. (We don't need to postulate fusion, as there is already a serviceable fusion reactor available nearby: it's that thing in the sky that burns your eyes when you look at it.) Let me repeat that because it bears emphasis: We are already in a post-scarcity condition. Put another way, all our problems now are psychological. Which is kind of what you were saying, or not?
- makomk 10y ago
  In some sense, the Internet is a basic need because it acts as a more efficient way of filling people's other needs than what preceded it: the need for social interaction, for entertainment, the need to learn more about the world...

DanielBMarkham 10y ago

There will be no post-scarcity economy, or rather, if there is one, we're already living in it. People like to trade stuff. This means there will always be things people want to trade. This means money, commerce, and scarcity aren't going anywhere. The post-scarcity folks seem to assume that there is some basic set of things: food, shelter, healthcare ... that once we have, we'll be "done" It's never going to work that way. Let me put this another way. We live in a world with millions, perhaps tens of millions of millionaires. Folks that if they wanted would never have to work again. Do these people stop working? Do they stop accumulating and trading things? Is their participation in the economy so drastically different than others? The poorest person in the U.S. is living a better life than the richest person alive 1,000 years ago. Do they live in any fashion similar to those folks? Would those folks, if they could see 1,000 years into the future, guess at how the common many would behave, given all the things he has? Post scarcity is a nice sentiment, it just doesn't work.

zaguios 10y ago
There may not be post scarcity as there will always people the desire more and thus commerce will exist. However that doesn't necessarily means that everyone needs to contribute to that economy. If we have developed the technology to allow for basic food, shelter, and healthcare then people who don't strive for anything more should be able to acquire these things without additional work and become a basic right. In my mind the idea of basic work isn't to stop people from working, it's to stop requiring it for basic livelihood.
ZenoArrow 10y ago
> "People like to trade stuff. This means there will always be things people want to trade. This means money, commerce, and scarcity aren't going anywhere." Sure, there will continue to be trade, but the need/desire to trade will be reduced. To look at how/why, you need to look at decentralised production. Technologies like 3D printers promise to be able to produce many of the products we currently trade for, and this goes beyond the plastic trinkets people currently associate with 3D printers (there are already 3D printer devices in the fields of clothing, food, medicine, heavy machinery, etc...). So whilst there will be trade for the raw materials, why would you pay someone else to make something for you when you have access to a machine to do it for you (note that I said access, not ownership, I don't expect everyone will own a device that can create a car, for example)? It makes sense for people to cut out the middle man when the end result is just as good as they could've gotten by paying a premium. There will still be people wishing to trade for things they can't get for low cost locally, but there will be a lot of industries disrupted by the ability of people to produce their own consumer goods.
carapace 10y ago
The point is that our problems are shifting from physical ("How do we eat?") to psychological ("Where shall we have lunch?"). I've heard it said that, "even God hesitates to offer anything but bread to the starving man."

saynsedit 10y ago

Some may argue we are already in a post-scarcity economy. Unfortunately virtual scarcity will persist for some time. This is because the economic system isn't organized enough to distribute all resources fairly and efficiently. As jobs decline (due to increased automation and export), the old way of distributing resources fairly fails, and virtual scarcity will increase. UBI seems like it can fill that gap but I worry that it's an overly simplistic solution. It seems like it can cause runaway inflation without a counter-balance. What prevents rent/food/gas prices from simply going up?

brokencode 10y ago
Competition will continue to keep prices down. Just because people have a new source of income, doesn't mean they that will become more likely to buy overpriced goods.
- justinmk 10y ago
  > Competition will continue to keep prices down That's an incomplete statement, because it doesn't quantify the effect. Will the effect be zero, or will BI be priced-in (higher prices, lower present-value of BI)? US college tuition and housing prices increased dramatically, because of decreased consumer price discrimination driven by low-barrier loans.
- saynsedit 10y ago
  What will drive the commensurate increase in competition? If competition stays the same, inflation will simply drive prices up.

justinmk 10y ago

> The main threats are overpopulation and politics, as tech seems to be ticking along quite nicely. If [over]population is a factor, then "post-scarcity" is fiction. This makes me think BI advocates are quietly assuming constraints such as "we'll discourage reproduction somehow"--while constantly mentioning how BI will be free of constraints.

chillwaves 10y ago
Seems easy enough to give BI to folks who are 18+ and not offer more for kids, or only offer more for the first kid, whatever. There's no reason to give a financial incentive to have more kids, and if you don't the disincentive is already built in (kids cost money). By the way, the issue is not as much population growth as high consumption. What is worse, more people living on basic income or the billions in China and India aspiring to an American middle class lifestyle?
- justinmk 10y ago
  > Seems easy enough to give BI to folks who are 18+ and not offer more for kids, or only offer more for the first kid, So absence of scarcity will totally be a thing if everything just goes according to plan. Got it.
  - chillwaves 10y ago
    Absence of scarcity is not a result of BI. You have it mixed up. It's the other way around entirely. My response (quoted by you) is merely to counter the urban legend that poor people just like popping out babies to get that sweet government assistance. Alleviating extreme poverty does more to slow population growth than anything else we know so far. Your sarcasm does not contribute to this discussion.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
SmellTheGlove 10y ago

twisterius 10y ago

What about the environmental impact of chopping down forest to make way for farmland. The impact of billions more traversing the globe and leaving their litter. What about the real scarcity of clean water on this planet, sure we can desalinate the ocean but what will be the unitended consequences of this. What about when we start running out of oxygen when we've destroyed everything else under the vanguard of a human population without scarcity.

Nicolas_Colin 10y ago

I wrote the article. Thank you for your response. I don't think post-scarcity will eat the entire economy anytime soon. In particular, I think that it will still be unaffordable to access proper medical care, child care, and housing. And I don't see how UBI solves that. Hence there are more pressing problems, like deploying a sustainable universal health insurance in the US (either public option or single payer) and reflecting on how we could make housing more affordable so that middle class and working class people can live where the jobs are located.

makomk 10y ago
On the contrary, I think that is exactly why post-scarcity is going to devour the economy. Think about what happens when access to medical care and housing become the scarce resources, when it becomes pointless to buy more consumer goods because you have nowhere to put them anyway. More and more of the economy becomes diverted into the pockets of those who own real estate and the medical industry. Improvements in efficiency elsewhere just make the problem worse further damage those industries. An increasing portion of our economy gets siphoned into the pockets of a rentier class with little reason to spend it.
ZenoArrow 10y ago
> "deploying a sustainable universal health insurance in the US (either public option or single payer)" Why involve the insurance companies at all? They're just a drain on the US healthcare system. If you cut out the insurance companies, changed the rules about price gouging in the pharmaceutical industry and engaged in preventative medicine (such as offering support to those who wanted to lose weight), the US could easily afford publicly funded healthcare. Other countries with fewer resources have managed it just fine. Even if you have to raise taxes to do it, you could do so and still leave people with more money in their pocket compared to when they were paying out insurance premiums.
SmellTheGlove 10y ago
> I wrote the article. Thank you for your response. I don't think post-scarcity will eat the entire economy anytime soon. In particular, I think that it will still be unaffordable to access proper medical care, child care, and housing. And I don't see how UBI solves that. From a US-centric perspective, those things are true. But the rest of the industrialized world has largely solved access to medical care (even if they are still working on timeliness in some respects). Child care has been solved in parts of the world through a combo of subsidy and parental leave - you can look at parts of Canada and Northern Europe for some models. Housing is tricky - areas are expensive because they're either on the coasts or near major economic hubs. In a post-scarcity economy, there will still be upward pressure on the former, but the latter eases quite a bit. We'll see it sooner than this, though, as tech starts to go more and more remote, and production processes become more and more automated. Not tomorrow, but optimistically, within my childrens' lifetimes. > Hence there are more pressing problems, like deploying a sustainable universal health insurance in the US (either public option or single payer) and reflecting on how we could make housing more affordable so that middle class and working class people can live where the jobs are located. I agree with both of these. Both of these problems have some political solutions, though. They're not technical impossibilities.

WheelsAtLarge 10y ago

Post-scarcity while a nice idea is something that will never be reached. All we have to do is look a Maslow's hierarchy of needs(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs) there are no absolutes there only relatives. You can never fulfill relative needs for all. Here's a very simple example. We can make a very strong argument that we've reached a very high mark on safety. We live in a society that's safer now than ever before. Yet we are constantly scared that the world will come to an end. Politicians and the media have made sure we have something to be scared of. Do all people feel safe? No, yet by all statistics we live in a very safe society. Another one, internet access. Forty years ago, if anyone even mentioned that it needs to be a basic need they would have been laugh at with no mercy. Today, it's not such a ridiculous thought. You say these are really wants. Yes to some but wants are so strong to some(many) that they become basic needs. How many times have you heard some one say,"I need my coffee." Really, coffee is a need? Given this what does post-scarcity really mean? We can define a set of basic needs now but over time they will change and they will grow.

carapace 10y ago
Well, that's the question facing us, in the large: Do we create artificial scarcity to keep our bullshit going? Or do we, as a species, learn to relax and stop effing with each other? We had to hit each other with sharp bits of metal for a long time. We don't have to do that anymore. Do we notice or not? Bucky Fuller pointed out that, in terms of our technical ability, post-scarcity arrived in the seventies. We can call it with the invention of the microprocessor. (We don't need to postulate fusion, as there is already a serviceable fusion reactor available nearby: it's that thing in the sky that burns your eyes when you look at it.) Let me repeat that because it bears emphasis: We are already in a post-scarcity condition. Put another way, all our problems now are psychological. Which is kind of what you were saying, or not?
makomk 10y ago
In some sense, the Internet is a basic need because it acts as a more efficient way of filling people's other needs than what preceded it: the need for social interaction, for entertainment, the need to learn more about the world...