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All other allocation strategies in practice (that come to my mind) pretty cold-bloodedly control access to life requirements. Communism probably being the notab
by ethbro 8y ago
All other allocation strategies in practice (that come to my mind) pretty cold-bloodedly control access to life requirements. Communism probably being the notable exclusion, but I'd say my point is born out there too.
In that in non-communist allocation systems, if one does not produce value (somewhat arbitrarily defined, but usually semi-attached to actual value) then neither one nor one's children eat.
UBI fundamentally changes this, in that hypothetically people could do nothing (and reproduce), thereby eventually exhausting available energy resources.
If your point is that everything has an absolute carrying capacity, then agreed. But here I'm assuming UBI is implemented before resource scarcity is truly eliminated by technological progress.
Thereby leaving the equation in an "It balances, but only if these percentage of people work, age demographics don't get too out of whack, and population growth falls in range" state.
- JoshCole 8y agoOh, I get what you're saying now. Thanks for the clarification. You're right that without anything in place to prevent it, universal basic income can fall prey to something similar to a tragedy of the commons. You're also right that its vulnerable to changes in population, with both huge swings up and down turning into a tax with low projected benefit once its split among the population. Definitely a severe structural problem, which would make putting more explicit population control mechanics into the system important if it were widely adopted.