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My fear is that once this gets rolled into production, every other politicians campaign is going to be “increase the basic income” until we are all basically li
by crobertsbmw 7y ago
My fear is that once this gets rolled into production, every other politicians campaign is going to be “increase the basic income” until we are all basically living off the top .01%
- Uhhrrr 7y agoSocial competitiveness should keep most people chasing money.
- iron0013 7y agoDoesn’t the top .01% already live off the rest of us?
- lukifer 7y agoIn a highly networked world, Metcalfe's Law [0] trends most services towards winner-take-all. Living off the 0.01% may be our least-worst alternative to neo-feudalism. One under-discussed aspect of UBI is that it might render minimum wage unnecessary; people could end up working for luxuries rather than subsistence. And of course, there are other non-monetary incentives to work (intrinsic rewards, passion projects, prestige/reputation). Still, the issue you raise is significant. The thing that bugs me about UBI as proposed, is that there isn't a clear Schelling focus, or organic emergent self-balancing process, for deciding how much it should be. I'm a fan of Yang, but the "$1000/mo" target is ultimately arbitrary, because it's a nice round number, and large enough to have a significant impact in people's lives. But why not $750 or $1250? Why shouldn't it index to regional cost of living and/or GDP? What metric do we use to decide when/if it should update? I don't think that's a reason not to do it, and I suspect any amount of UBI will result in better outcomes than spending the same money on bloated federal bureaucracies; but it feels very zero-sum / tug-of-war to just pick a nice-sounding number, and then have to fight over raising or lowering it every election cycle. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law