11 ms·

Just in my personal opinion, things like a UBI move us towards that world. It wound allow people flexibility.

winfred 6y ago
The way I see it, we already have that world, with capitalism functioning as a filter. I worked my ass off to reach financial independence, now I'm dedicating the rest of my life towards helping other people. I've proven to be capable of using the system to a degree where I can do whatever I want, which allows me the freedom to help other people full time. It's not a perfect system, but I doubt UBI will be much better. At least capitalism filters out many of the people who shouldn't be helping others. Helping those in need isn't something everyone should be doing. Not every needy person should be helped and helping others in desperate need incurs a mental cost that's not easy to carry.
- duncan-donuts 6y ago
  Why should any single person carry the weight of the person in desperate need? UBI + healthcare implies that there’s a social safety net that creates an entire network of people to carry this weight. I don’t have a clue if any implementations would successfully do this but to just throw people in desperate need to the wolves is inhumane.
  - winfred 6y ago
    I don't think people would prosper under such a system. Free health care, yes, free education, yes. Retirement for all, take care of the disabled, yes. But in my opinion, in today's society, if you take away the need for people to struggle (which UBI will do) they often end up in a worse mental and physical shape than if you make them suffer a bit. Just the way natural selection programmed us. "All basic needs are met <- conserve energy". I can imagine a educational system where we prepare our children from childhood for UBI and it will work. But given how rudimentary most education still is I don't see that happen anytime soon. Maybe in 100 years.
    - michaelmrose 6y ago
      >But in my opinion, in today's society, if you take away the need for people to struggle (which UBI will do) they often end up in a worse mental and physical shape than if you make them suffer a bit. This is exactly the opposite of how people actually work people excel when given support and opportunity to grow. Adversity especially insofar as fear of basic needs being met isn't inspiring it's stunting. Anything else is a basic dysfunction in understanding people fed by survivorship bias. Imagine if you met someone who was sure that plant growth was maximized by periodically holding a lighter to one or another of the leaves because all the surviving plants had gone through that. Your understanding is every bit as ridiculous. We can find sufficient challenge and adversity as we need to move us in our own selves, relationships, and field of endeavor.
      - luckylion 6y ago
        > people excel when given support and opportunity to grow. Some people do. Many don't, they'll take that support and rest on it. Plenty of European Countries have UBI for all intents and purposes (free health care, housing, utilities, enough cash money for everything else including entertainment and communication). People don't excel, and plenty don't bother to contribute, because it's not necessary. > We can find sufficient challenge and adversity as we need to move us in our own selves, relationships, and field of endeavor. You're looking at a tiny subset of people that wouldn't stop working (but maybe work on different things) if they won the lottery, and extrapolate from them on to the general population. Not everybody is like that. Any solutions that pretend that they are will fail.
        michaelmrose 6y ago
        I don't think people having their basic needs met is in any way equivalent to winning the lottery. When you win the lottery you can have anything financially that you like for the rest of your life or until you blow all your money. With UBI you can have a minimalistic life devoid of most luxury or ease. The kind of person who doesn't bother to contribute is probably the kind of person who would be contributing by making fries or checking you out at walmart. These contributions can be replaced by automation and nothing of value will be lost meanwhile some portion of the people will use their time that would have been thrown away at walmart to actually contribute. If 90% of the team at walmart was replaced by robots and 10% found more meaningful ways to contribute it would be a net gain. > You're looking at a tiny subset of people that wouldn't stop working (but maybe work on different things) if they won the lottery, and extrapolate from them on to the general population. Not everybody is like that. Any solutions that pretend that they are will fail. If you offered most people a poverty wage of 2k monthly and netflix and the opportunity to earn 2k + whatever they could earn in addition doing something with their life 90% would chose the latter given the option especially if free education were available to get from A to B. Most people want to feel their life is meaningful. If you don't understand that then you don't understand people in the slightest.
- einpoklum 6y ago
  > I worked my ass off to reach financial independence This is a false pursuit, and in a sense a vacuous statement. You are never independent of society around you. You are in constant need of others doing that invisible and visible labor - in production and in services - to maintain your way of life. It's only with Capitalism being the way it is that you need to "work your ass off" to not be financially dependent on your parents, or at the risk of a crisis and collapse upon losing your job etc.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Grimm1 6y ago
    Not really capitalism's fault. Regulatory capture, weak laws that let that happen, government corruption, lobbying laws and other things are more to blame. The USA was still a capitalist society when the American dream was alive and well with a thriving middle class. Meanwhile nations with planned economies, abolished land ownership and worker owned means of production were starving and seeing general iniquity. Now those protections that gave us a thriving middle class and general economic prosperity have been largely gutted and our government generally subverted. My point is, the ills of a country are likely the cause of governmental failings and destabilization exploited by the ruling class of the system to entrench themselves and expand their interests at the expense of the general public, regardless of what that that system is. It can happen to any system of governance paired with any economic system. I think we should be cleaning our government up and taking that power back, but that by putting the blame squarely on capitalism you're missing the forest for the trees. The problem is allowing whatever naturally formed ruling class in an economic and or political ecosystem from concentrating too much power, and potentially resources [1], in the first place. [1] Though I'm skeptical of this but in so much as resources equate to power maybe it's necessary.
    - bavell 6y ago
      Completely agreed. I see too many people jumping on the "Capitalism is the root of all evil" bandwagon too easily without critical thought. Like you, I see our current problems arising due to the usual historical culprits of corruption and shifting balance of power within a system of government. All systems of government are subject to these forces and while it's true our current system is clogged with crap, it's not capitalism we should be blaming.
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  Much of that “desperate need” is created, or worsened, by capitalism.¹ It isn't just a matter of “working hard”. Say you're a brilliantly capable developer for three months out of every year, have around four months of chronic pain and bad mental health unpredictably breaking up the remaining time. Unless you're wealthy, capitalism doesn't let you get to a situation where your bad mental health doesn't disrupt that five month stretch where you could be doing worthwhile things – even if you would make enough money in those three months to support yourself, when most of it's going into paying off the debt you got into because you lost your job and had to eat, it's difficult to do so. Think this is a bit much? Okay, how about this: you're in jail on suspicion of committing some crime or other. This lasts 1½ weeks, before they realise that no, actually, you weren't guilty. But in the meantime, you've lost your job, and without the savings you'd usually gather prior to job-hopping… what then? You might've worked really, really hard to get where you are. For many, working really, really hard simply isn't enough. --- ¹: “Capitalism” here is shorthand for “society being structured under the assumption that capitalism is a fully-general ideal solution for allocating all resources, and there are only a handful of narrow examples where it makes sense to do something else”. There's nothing inherent to capitalism that causes these things, any more than a chainsaw is responsible for felled trees. But this is pedantry, so I kept it out of the first sentence.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
pm90 6y ago
UBI + Government funded, free healthcare for everyone. It makes no sense that, with all the excess industrial supply that we have today, that we refuse to provide a basic minimum standard of living for all human beings.
- fastball 6y ago
  The problem with healthcare is that "basic minimum" is wildly subjective. Healthcare is still very expensive. There are diseases (including cancer) we could easily spend millions per patient on. Pulling out all the stops you could spend 10s of millions. But we really don't have that kind of societal overabundance, not yet. So how much do you spend per patient? Are there certain diseases that you don't spend any public money on because the interventions are so expensive compared to success rates? It's really not a simple set of decisions to make, and those decisions do need to be made (or more to the point: agreed upon).
  - _Microft 6y ago
    What problems do you see beside the ones that basically any country with a public health care system has (/has solved)?
    - fastball 6y ago
      What do you mean? A country having implemented a nationalized healthcare system does not mean the problem in question has been "solved", it just means that particular society has managed to agree where to draw the line. But this does not guarantee the population at large will continue agreeing indefinitely into the future.
      - _Microft 6y ago
        Umm... yes? Of course this is subject to change. What else did you expect?
        fastball 6y ago
smitty1e 6y ago
Perhaps you're correct, and my cynicism misplaced.
aeturnum 6y ago
I support UBI! I also suspect that we need to go beyond universal benefits into grappling with the reality that different people have different needs. We'll need to agree on a way to discern which society should take on and which are individual.
flatline 6y ago
It would allow flexibility for those who can manage their money successfully, and aren’t horribly unlucky. Unfortunately that population is relatively sparse - the monthly stipend is going to be funneled into the pockets of unscrupulous lenders as fast as you can say, “easy credit”. If it weren’t the US, with our habit of lifestyle inflation and tremendous consumer and educational debt, I’d be much more optimistic about it. Would it be better than what we have now? Possibly! I’m fairly confident a real social safety net would be better. Or tight regulations around all that liquidity in the market, presumably pulled from elsewhere in the public coffers. At the end of the day it still sounds like wealth redistribution away from properly funded public works.
- oneplane 6y ago
  UBI can exist outside of the US.
4ec0755f5522 6y ago
I wonder if UBI could be marketed politically in this way, e.g. "Finally paying for all the things you've already been using" or "Finally paying for the free labor you've based your life on" etc. type of messaging. I mean, it should be less guilt-y of course (I'm not in marketing) and somehow capture it's _society_ finally paying for the things generated by free/underpaid labor, not individual citizens, and not imply that people have been selfish etc.
- jimkleiber 6y ago
  I love this! This thread got me thinking that nurturing/feeding/raising a child could be seen as something a parent does not just for their family but for society, and if it were for society, is it now a paid job that requires minimum wage? And all of the other things that are "volunteer labor" but for corporations, which technically in the US one can't very legally volunteer for a for-profit company without compensation. I like the spin on seeing this from a new marketing angle, new framing.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    Remember that, if you make it a job, you're no longer free to decide how you want to raise your children, what values to teach them etc, you're now just a caretaker that produces a labor source for their employer. I'm not sure that's such an attractive thought.
    - eulenteufel 6y ago
      There are a lot of self employed that have freedom on how to do their work. We could see it as self-employed contribution to the future of society. Also raising new citizens with a diverse set of values & beliefs is exactly what I would want to see. It would be horrible if their was some kind of institution that would dictate the same kind of upbringing for every child. However, in the end parenting is really not a job even though it provides value to society. That doesn't mean it doesn't have to be financially supported just because it is not like the kind of work that typically gets paid.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
Currently I think UBI is early, there is still plenty of work for people who are willing to put in the time and sacrifice. HOWEVER, in time it will become very necessary or there will be mass civil unrest as AI and other automation takes over almost all of our jobs. I feel healthcare should be a human right but I can't quite justify UBI to support all of society, I don't think it works currently and isn't practical. I have seen essentially the same going on (heavily subsidized rural areas) and people do become dependent and lazy (maybe unambitious is better word) if they know they will be receiving enough money to cover rent/food/moderate entertainment money. I am not blaming them compeltely, the areas I lived in had very very few opportunities and people want to stay close to their family and "what they know". I was more of an adventurous, nerdy soul so I got out of it as quickly as I could, but it is disingenuous to act like people won't be lazy if given the chance. There has to be something in the middle to incentivize them, especially when they've seen no other way of life. I full expect to be grayed into oblivion but I think my viewpoint holds some truth.
rsync 6y ago
"Just in my personal opinion, things like a UBI move us towards that world. It wound allow people flexibility." I don't have any well formed opinions about UBI and I believe myself to be open-minded about it. I do, however, think that GSE/WSB is going to push it back outside the overton window. Nobody in power - across the broad political spectrum, from Feinstein to McConnell and everyone in between - is going to sign us up for more of that.

The way I see it, we already have that world, with capitalism functioning as a filter. I worked my ass off to reach financial independence, now I'm dedicating the rest of my life towards helping other people. I've proven to be capable of using the system to a degree where I can do whatever I want, which allows me the freedom to help other people full time. It's not a perfect system, but I doubt UBI will be much better. At least capitalism filters out many of the people who shouldn't be helping others. Helping those in need isn't something everyone should be doing. Not every needy person should be helped and helping others in desperate need incurs a mental cost that's not easy to carry.

duncan-donuts 6y ago
Why should any single person carry the weight of the person in desperate need? UBI + healthcare implies that there’s a social safety net that creates an entire network of people to carry this weight. I don’t have a clue if any implementations would successfully do this but to just throw people in desperate need to the wolves is inhumane.
- winfred 6y ago
  I don't think people would prosper under such a system. Free health care, yes, free education, yes. Retirement for all, take care of the disabled, yes. But in my opinion, in today's society, if you take away the need for people to struggle (which UBI will do) they often end up in a worse mental and physical shape than if you make them suffer a bit. Just the way natural selection programmed us. "All basic needs are met <- conserve energy". I can imagine a educational system where we prepare our children from childhood for UBI and it will work. But given how rudimentary most education still is I don't see that happen anytime soon. Maybe in 100 years.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    >But in my opinion, in today's society, if you take away the need for people to struggle (which UBI will do) they often end up in a worse mental and physical shape than if you make them suffer a bit. This is exactly the opposite of how people actually work people excel when given support and opportunity to grow. Adversity especially insofar as fear of basic needs being met isn't inspiring it's stunting. Anything else is a basic dysfunction in understanding people fed by survivorship bias. Imagine if you met someone who was sure that plant growth was maximized by periodically holding a lighter to one or another of the leaves because all the surviving plants had gone through that. Your understanding is every bit as ridiculous. We can find sufficient challenge and adversity as we need to move us in our own selves, relationships, and field of endeavor.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      > people excel when given support and opportunity to grow. Some people do. Many don't, they'll take that support and rest on it. Plenty of European Countries have UBI for all intents and purposes (free health care, housing, utilities, enough cash money for everything else including entertainment and communication). People don't excel, and plenty don't bother to contribute, because it's not necessary. > We can find sufficient challenge and adversity as we need to move us in our own selves, relationships, and field of endeavor. You're looking at a tiny subset of people that wouldn't stop working (but maybe work on different things) if they won the lottery, and extrapolate from them on to the general population. Not everybody is like that. Any solutions that pretend that they are will fail.
      - michaelmrose 6y ago
        I don't think people having their basic needs met is in any way equivalent to winning the lottery. When you win the lottery you can have anything financially that you like for the rest of your life or until you blow all your money. With UBI you can have a minimalistic life devoid of most luxury or ease. The kind of person who doesn't bother to contribute is probably the kind of person who would be contributing by making fries or checking you out at walmart. These contributions can be replaced by automation and nothing of value will be lost meanwhile some portion of the people will use their time that would have been thrown away at walmart to actually contribute. If 90% of the team at walmart was replaced by robots and 10% found more meaningful ways to contribute it would be a net gain. > You're looking at a tiny subset of people that wouldn't stop working (but maybe work on different things) if they won the lottery, and extrapolate from them on to the general population. Not everybody is like that. Any solutions that pretend that they are will fail. If you offered most people a poverty wage of 2k monthly and netflix and the opportunity to earn 2k + whatever they could earn in addition doing something with their life 90% would chose the latter given the option especially if free education were available to get from A to B. Most people want to feel their life is meaningful. If you don't understand that then you don't understand people in the slightest.
einpoklum 6y ago
> I worked my ass off to reach financial independence This is a false pursuit, and in a sense a vacuous statement. You are never independent of society around you. You are in constant need of others doing that invisible and visible labor - in production and in services - to maintain your way of life. It's only with Capitalism being the way it is that you need to "work your ass off" to not be financially dependent on your parents, or at the risk of a crisis and collapse upon losing your job etc.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Grimm1 6y ago
  Not really capitalism's fault. Regulatory capture, weak laws that let that happen, government corruption, lobbying laws and other things are more to blame. The USA was still a capitalist society when the American dream was alive and well with a thriving middle class. Meanwhile nations with planned economies, abolished land ownership and worker owned means of production were starving and seeing general iniquity. Now those protections that gave us a thriving middle class and general economic prosperity have been largely gutted and our government generally subverted. My point is, the ills of a country are likely the cause of governmental failings and destabilization exploited by the ruling class of the system to entrench themselves and expand their interests at the expense of the general public, regardless of what that that system is. It can happen to any system of governance paired with any economic system. I think we should be cleaning our government up and taking that power back, but that by putting the blame squarely on capitalism you're missing the forest for the trees. The problem is allowing whatever naturally formed ruling class in an economic and or political ecosystem from concentrating too much power, and potentially resources [1], in the first place. [1] Though I'm skeptical of this but in so much as resources equate to power maybe it's necessary.
  - bavell 6y ago
    Completely agreed. I see too many people jumping on the "Capitalism is the root of all evil" bandwagon too easily without critical thought. Like you, I see our current problems arising due to the usual historical culprits of corruption and shifting balance of power within a system of government. All systems of government are subject to these forces and while it's true our current system is clogged with crap, it's not capitalism we should be blaming.
wizzwizz4 6y ago
Much of that “desperate need” is created, or worsened, by capitalism.¹ It isn't just a matter of “working hard”. Say you're a brilliantly capable developer for three months out of every year, have around four months of chronic pain and bad mental health unpredictably breaking up the remaining time. Unless you're wealthy, capitalism doesn't let you get to a situation where your bad mental health doesn't disrupt that five month stretch where you could be doing worthwhile things – even if you would make enough money in those three months to support yourself, when most of it's going into paying off the debt you got into because you lost your job and had to eat, it's difficult to do so. Think this is a bit much? Okay, how about this: you're in jail on suspicion of committing some crime or other. This lasts 1½ weeks, before they realise that no, actually, you weren't guilty. But in the meantime, you've lost your job, and without the savings you'd usually gather prior to job-hopping… what then? You might've worked really, really hard to get where you are. For many, working really, really hard simply isn't enough. --- ¹: “Capitalism” here is shorthand for “society being structured under the assumption that capitalism is a fully-general ideal solution for allocating all resources, and there are only a handful of narrow examples where it makes sense to do something else”. There's nothing inherent to capitalism that causes these things, any more than a chainsaw is responsible for felled trees. But this is pedantry, so I kept it out of the first sentence.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

pm90 6y ago

UBI + Government funded, free healthcare for everyone. It makes no sense that, with all the excess industrial supply that we have today, that we refuse to provide a basic minimum standard of living for all human beings.

fastball 6y ago
The problem with healthcare is that "basic minimum" is wildly subjective. Healthcare is still very expensive. There are diseases (including cancer) we could easily spend millions per patient on. Pulling out all the stops you could spend 10s of millions. But we really don't have that kind of societal overabundance, not yet. So how much do you spend per patient? Are there certain diseases that you don't spend any public money on because the interventions are so expensive compared to success rates? It's really not a simple set of decisions to make, and those decisions do need to be made (or more to the point: agreed upon).
- _Microft 6y ago
  What problems do you see beside the ones that basically any country with a public health care system has (/has solved)?
  - fastball 6y ago
    What do you mean? A country having implemented a nationalized healthcare system does not mean the problem in question has been "solved", it just means that particular society has managed to agree where to draw the line. But this does not guarantee the population at large will continue agreeing indefinitely into the future.
    - _Microft 6y ago
      Umm... yes? Of course this is subject to change. What else did you expect?
      - fastball 6y ago

smitty1e 6y ago

Perhaps you're correct, and my cynicism misplaced.

aeturnum 6y ago

I support UBI! I also suspect that we need to go beyond universal benefits into grappling with the reality that different people have different needs. We'll need to agree on a way to discern which society should take on and which are individual.

flatline 6y ago

It would allow flexibility for those who can manage their money successfully, and aren’t horribly unlucky. Unfortunately that population is relatively sparse - the monthly stipend is going to be funneled into the pockets of unscrupulous lenders as fast as you can say, “easy credit”. If it weren’t the US, with our habit of lifestyle inflation and tremendous consumer and educational debt, I’d be much more optimistic about it. Would it be better than what we have now? Possibly! I’m fairly confident a real social safety net would be better. Or tight regulations around all that liquidity in the market, presumably pulled from elsewhere in the public coffers. At the end of the day it still sounds like wealth redistribution away from properly funded public works.

oneplane 6y ago
UBI can exist outside of the US.

4ec0755f5522 6y ago

I wonder if UBI could be marketed politically in this way, e.g. "Finally paying for all the things you've already been using" or "Finally paying for the free labor you've based your life on" etc. type of messaging. I mean, it should be less guilt-y of course (I'm not in marketing) and somehow capture it's _society_ finally paying for the things generated by free/underpaid labor, not individual citizens, and not imply that people have been selfish etc.

jimkleiber 6y ago
I love this! This thread got me thinking that nurturing/feeding/raising a child could be seen as something a parent does not just for their family but for society, and if it were for society, is it now a paid job that requires minimum wage? And all of the other things that are "volunteer labor" but for corporations, which technically in the US one can't very legally volunteer for a for-profit company without compensation. I like the spin on seeing this from a new marketing angle, new framing.
- luckylion 6y ago
  Remember that, if you make it a job, you're no longer free to decide how you want to raise your children, what values to teach them etc, you're now just a caretaker that produces a labor source for their employer. I'm not sure that's such an attractive thought.
  - eulenteufel 6y ago
    There are a lot of self employed that have freedom on how to do their work. We could see it as self-employed contribution to the future of society. Also raising new citizens with a diverse set of values & beliefs is exactly what I would want to see. It would be horrible if their was some kind of institution that would dictate the same kind of upbringing for every child. However, in the end parenting is really not a job even though it provides value to society. That doesn't mean it doesn't have to be financially supported just because it is not like the kind of work that typically gets paid.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

Currently I think UBI is early, there is still plenty of work for people who are willing to put in the time and sacrifice. HOWEVER, in time it will become very necessary or there will be mass civil unrest as AI and other automation takes over almost all of our jobs. I feel healthcare should be a human right but I can't quite justify UBI to support all of society, I don't think it works currently and isn't practical. I have seen essentially the same going on (heavily subsidized rural areas) and people do become dependent and lazy (maybe unambitious is better word) if they know they will be receiving enough money to cover rent/food/moderate entertainment money. I am not blaming them compeltely, the areas I lived in had very very few opportunities and people want to stay close to their family and "what they know". I was more of an adventurous, nerdy soul so I got out of it as quickly as I could, but it is disingenuous to act like people won't be lazy if given the chance. There has to be something in the middle to incentivize them, especially when they've seen no other way of life. I full expect to be grayed into oblivion but I think my viewpoint holds some truth.

rsync 6y ago

"Just in my personal opinion, things like a UBI move us towards that world. It wound allow people flexibility." I don't have any well formed opinions about UBI and I believe myself to be open-minded about it. I do, however, think that GSE/WSB is going to push it back outside the overton window. Nobody in power - across the broad political spectrum, from Feinstein to McConnell and everyone in between - is going to sign us up for more of that.