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The fact that so many people fear loss of income as a result of better AI is a real indictment of our economic system. A better system that more fairly distribu

The fact that so many people fear loss of income as a result of better AI is a real indictment of our economic system. A better system that more fairly distributed economic productivity would make people welcome better AI because they could be confident it would make everyone wealthier instead of just a few people rich enough to be Goa'uld.

kofejnik 3y ago
Define “fairly”
- pavlov 3y ago
  The grandparent comment does contain a definition: “A […] system that […] would make people welcome better AI because they could be confident it would make everyone wealthier” That would be a fair system regardless of the specifics of how it’s achieved.
  - neogodless 3y ago
    One clarifying point: Even when nearly everyone gets wealthier, if inequality grows, most people don't feel like it's fair.
    - Sakos 3y ago
      What matters is the real effects of being wealthier. If it means you and everybody else can afford a place to live, then "feeling" it's unfair just doesn't matter.
  - nomel 3y ago
    Not that person, but I don’t believe that sentence approaches a definition of “fairly”. “Make everyone richer” is all fine, until you realize that you’re only a penny richer. But maybe it’s justified. That justification is what the “fairly” definition would require, and is extremely important.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    Well, then we have been living in a system that's as close to fair as possible since global individual wealth has been growing for a long time. The few times we had it shrink significantly over some period of time is when local populations attempted forced wealth distribution. Our present system, by this definition, is amazing!
    - bandyaboot 3y ago
      > Well, then we have been living in a system that's as close to fair as possible since global individual wealth has been growing for a long time. That’s a non-sequitur.
      - renewiltord 3y ago
        No it's not. If the property of fairness is that everyone grows wealthier then a system that makes everyone wealthier is a fair system. That's as close to a tautology as possible. The resulting absurdity is why OP was right to ask what fairness was: everyone has their own belief in it, oriented towards equality or proportionality or some notion of deserving.
        bandyaboot 3y ago
        In order to claim that the system is “as close to fair as possible”, you would have to demonstrate that the system has optimized everyone’s wealth growth as much as possible. Something going up for a long time isn’t proof of optimization.
        renewiltord 3y ago
        Well, no you don't have to optimize each person's wealth growth. It could be incredibly uneven so long as you optimize the number of people whose wealth grows. And clearly, since it is better than every other method, it is the best by definition. If other things were not done it is because they were not possible: since possibility requires an agent to execute and since no agent succeeded in executing a better plan it is, by definition, impossible.
  - buu700 3y ago
    Here's an idea: a UBI that's pegged to GDP and population. Make it comically small to start, like say 0.25% of GDP split evenly between all citizens. Based on 2021 US stats, that's $176 per person per year. That seems relatively unobjectionable regardless of your politics, even assuming that the % is likely to drift higher over time. With increasingly advanced AI and cheap energy, GDP would rise over the long run independently of population, ultimately increasing the UBI to a livable salary.
    - ilyt 3y ago
      Here is even simpler idea to make that feasible: Start actually taxing the corporations in a way that can't be trivially avoided. And don't tax them less than your own citizens. Maybe tax a bit of income on top of revenue. Maybe tax a bit more if income per employee is on high side.
      - buu700 3y ago
        If you're talking about a five-figure UBI, I don't think that would be simpler to pass through Congress. In terms of legislative complexity, I can't see how closing all major corporate tax loopholes would be simpler than implementing whatever minor tax revenue increase is necessary to offset a $176 UBI.
      - satvikpendem 3y ago
        Doing that is actually more complicated. There are a variety of questions regarding taxing them, and there are many more ways they could get around it. In contrast, an income tax actually collects revenue because people can't really get around having to pay it.
- newaccount74 3y ago
  Everyone gets as much as they need, everyone contributes as much as they can.
  - d0mine 3y ago
    ^ communisme
  - fabianhjr 3y ago
    to each according to their need, from each according to their ability
    - visarga 3y ago
      only works for media and language model data
  - atomicUpdate 3y ago
    Why would anyone contribute more than is required to get what they need, if they’ll never see any benefit beyond that? I prefer a system where people that work harder get more so they can have what they want, rather than just the bare minimum to survive (which is presumably what is meant by “what they need”).
    - frozenfoxx 3y ago
      Ask anyone that contributes to open source. Some of us like to make the world a better place.
      - jtms 3y ago
        yeah but plenty of people contribute to open source because it leads to being able to make a good, solid living.
    - yoyohello13 3y ago
      > I prefer a system where people that work harder get more so they can have what they want That’s fine and good, but I think many people imply that this is how our current system works. Which is just not the case.
- bmn__ 3y ago
  The video "Wealth Inequality in America" <https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM?t=35 https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM?t=35> at timestamp 0:35 shows a definition most respondents to the question agree on.
- HyperSane 3y ago
  Increases in GDP are evenly distributed across ALL income brackets.
gazby 3y ago
Indeed.
wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
I mean I think that's with every system a problem. Not just ours. Wealth distribution has been a challenge since we've moved away from spending our day solely focused on gathering food / farming. Every shock to our current system will take time to adjust.
- tharne 3y ago
  > Wealth distribution has been a challenge since we've moved away from spending our day solely focused on gathering food / farming. Have you ever considered that this may be due to the fact that our brains evolved to exist in a world where our day is largely focused on gathering food? We're not well-equipped to exist in other modes.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Kapura 3y ago
    [citation needed] primates don't spend the majority of their day gathering food; there's not reason to believe early humans were different.
    - tharne 3y ago
      I said, "majority of the day focused on gathering food, not "spent gathering food". If this seems like an arbitrary distinction, allow me to provide an analogy. Most teenage boys spend the majority of their day focused on having sex, but very few of them spend the majority of their day actually having sex (if they're even having sex at all). As for a citation, ask anyone who's spent any amount of their life with not enough food available. If you ask them how much of their time is spent focused on getting food or thinking about food, or worrying about food, they'll probably tell you "most of it".
    - oezi 3y ago
      It certainly depends much on the regional setting. Humans pushed to the boundaries of landscapes which support their existence. If you are a hunter gatherer in fertile jungle setting you might make do with 2 or 3h per day of hunting or gathering. If you live further north or south or in more arid regions that might take more time.
pydry 3y ago
If we could just stop being economically gaslighted it would help. The economic system can't be simultaneously unproductive enough to require us to keep raising the retirement age and so productive that job loss is a big problem. It is possible that a political war on labor is being waged at both ends.
- htss2013 3y ago
  It's possible to have certain things be abundant and other things be scarce simultaneously, because technology doesn't make everything abundant at the same time. That means certain types of labor are abundant and others scarce at the same time as well. There may be a war on certain kinds of labor but having to raise the retirement age and having job losses from tech aren't evidence of it.
  - pydry 3y ago
    >It's possible to have certain things be abundant and other things be scarce simultaneously This is so obvious it barely merits saying. >having to raise the retirement age You do realize that raising the retirement age also doesn't make "everything more abundant at the same time", right? Yet you internalized a belief that we have to do it when so much of the labor it would produce more of is already abundant. Why?
    - htss2013 3y ago
      >Yet you internalized a belief that we have to do it [keep laboring] when so much of the labor it would produce more of is already abundant. Why? If there is so much abundance and labor isn't needed, why is almost every country on Earth currently experiencing food inflation? Abundance would mean prices go down, not up. We would need fewer farmers, not more. Before you say it's being caused by corporate greed and price gouging, this is why I said globally. If for example Vietnam locally produces rice, and it's not even a capitalist country, there shouldn't be rice inflation there. Yet there is, and rice farmers in Vietnam aren't retiring because human labor and rice are so abundant. Why pretend that just because some things have become abundant with technology, we can make society wide proclamations about labor no longer being needed?
spaceman_2020 3y ago
Personally as a noob programmer, I feel like a superhuman because of GPT-4. Feel like my creativity has been unleashed and I can compete with the big boys.
- hunter-gatherer 3y ago
  I think that is where the scare comes from though. It used to be that churning out good code really did take a lot of experience. But as we lower that bar, the value a computer programmer has may begin to diminish. If everyone can spit out 200 lines of code in a day, thrn hiw valuable are you, really? I analyze malware for a living, and don't consider myself a strong developer, though I can write programs, obviously. As an example, this last week I had a task that I would normally have employed one of our developers to do because they do it better and faster. Instead, I used GPT. I effectively took a couple days of work from someone. This is all fone now becuase it is new, but after a few years managers may start to evaluate output of certain people and question the utility of having duplicative skills on payroll. To be clear, I'm not actually entirely sure this will happen. I think there was a similar discourse back in the days when excel was making the rounds because it brought "computing" to everyone-and it did. However, it wasn't catastrophic to the developer community in terms of employment.
  - adventured 3y ago
    You used to have to be an expert/specialist to have direct access to a computer, or understand precisely how to give them commands to work with them over an expensive connection (and on a limited basis in terms of time and how many could do it). That scarcity wasn't a good thing. People are drastically more empowered with computing today, the barriers were dropped in a rather extreme way (compared to where it started), and that is a good thing. These are conceptual groupings of advancement. One layer of complexity is going to be removed (broadening access), there will be further advancement and complexity where the skilled group can navigate to in order to best unleash what they're capable of. Writing the vast majority of code isn't special or super difficult (it's time consuming and mildly difficult at worst; quite obviously there are exceptions to that). There are a million plus software developers in the US alone. It's time to add new layers of complexity and advancement. Those million software developers will have to evolve, again, myself included.
trashface 3y ago
Loss of income kind of understates the issue I think. I'm an already long term unemployed programmer, and I've been playing around with copilot. It makes me think I'll never have income again from that trade, and possibly no other related field. But otherwise agree, bad economic system is bad.
VeninVidiaVicii 3y ago
Interesting take — I also think these arguments come from a place where people have (subconsciously?) come to terms with doing something monotonous or repetitive to survive.
qaq 3y ago
Well maybe shift to "real world" professions will occur resulting in us addressing abysmal infrastructure and housing situation. I am looking at picking up a trade because of this coming shift.
- spaceguillotine 3y ago
  i did that, i got injured at work and now can't do physical labor. Trades are hell on the body and bosses will toss you aside without any care. Join a Union if you're gonna go into the trades, i would've had protection and better safety. I took so many people to the ER for work injuries that were preventable but the bosses skimp on everything.
  - qaq 3y ago
    What would you say is the safest trade as far as risk of injury ?
    - user_7832 3y ago
      Not OP, but I’d assume something at a nuclear plant (or something else that’s govt owned.)
      - tekknik 3y ago
        Someone didn’t watch Chernobyl
        user_7832 3y ago
        Fair point haha
    - great_psy 3y ago
      I would say electrician? Your biggest risk is electrocution and asbestos exposure.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
ACV001 3y ago
This is a general statement withour any substance. Provide an example. Are you talking about communism?
adventured 3y ago
> The fact that so many people fear loss of income as a result of better AI is a real indictment of our economic system. Or they're mistaken in their assessment of what's going to actually happen, as they frequently have been when it comes to technological progress.
- ilyt 3y ago
  Well, every time it happened some people had their jobs made obsolete and were fired, and they had to find something else to do. And every time it happened the income inequality grew because the savings were mostly going as profits for the top levels of company. Yes, it hasn't been a disaster, but it clearly set some bad trends going.
- HyperSane 3y ago
  Wealth inequality in the US is already at absurd levels. The top 1% of Americans have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion (or 30.4% of all household wealth in the U.S.), while the bottom 50% of the population holds just $2.1 trillion combined (or 1.9% of all wealth). The Fed estimates that the wealthiest 10% of Americans hold more than 88% of all available equity in corporations and mutual fund shares (with just the top 1% controlling more than twice as much equity as the bottom 50% of all Americans combined).
breck 3y ago
Yes! So many people in information fields think that their relatively high earnings are a result of their economic contribution. The truth, which they are often mentally unwilling to face, is that their earnings are more do to being on the profitable side of Intellectual Slavery laws (copyrights and patents). The artificial scarcity created by these laws is what has generated such vast accumulations of wealth, not some intrinsic value to their unique creations. ChatGPT is exposing this uncomfortable truth to many people for the first time, apparently.
nextlevelwizard 3y ago
We haven’t come up with a better system.
- breck 3y ago
  Yes: open source. Open source has proved itself to be vastly superior to closed source development models. It does not generate obscene wealth disparities though—and some see that as a bug.
  - adwn 3y ago
    > Yes: open source. Open source is not an economic system in the sense in which this term is generally used. > Open source has proved itself to be vastly superior to closed source development models. "Superior" by which metric?
    - satvikpendem 3y ago
      And to add, many companies are going from open source back to proprietary licenses explicitly due to being unable to compete with closed companies like Amazon. Elastic, Sentry, and Docker come to mind. So any discussion of the super/inferiority of open source should include this phenomenon too.
    - breck 3y ago
      > Open source is not an economic system in the sense in which this term is generally used. We should move to a society where we look at software engineers as we look at road builders. City workers build roads, the people use those roads. Likewise, engineers build software, the people use said software. Our current system of (c)opywrong is bizarre and unnatural. > "Superior" by which metric? Well, I'm responding to your comment using an open source operating system running an open source web browser on an open source platform and you will likely read it on the same. I still use a handful of closed source products (Sublime Text comes to mind) but that's the exception, rather than the rule. This is vastly different from 25 years ago. In the long run, licenses are for losers.
lumb63 3y ago
This problem isn’t specific to AI. Luddites were concerned about machines taking their jobs. Marx recognized the role of “capital” (of which AI is the intellectual type) in suppressing the incomes of the working class relative to the owning class. Both Marx and the Luddites conceived of different solutions. One solution (the Luddite one) is to eschew the technology. If nobody adopts the technology, nobody has to, but nobody can benefit. On the contrary, if anyone adopts the technology, all can benefit, but all also have to suffer the negative impacts. Without everyone on board, the Luddite solution cannot work. Marx saw a different solution: communism. If the state owns the means of production, the working class and owning class benefit equally. It’s unlikely that we ever move toward this, in my opinion, due to the other issues inherent to communism (unfair (from the perspective of most policy makers) distribution of resources, corruption, etc.). We need to find a new solution; one which enables people to benefit from technology while minimizing the downsides, or at least localizing the downsides to those who choose to adopt it. Right now we have, IMO, one of the worst situations of both worlds: privatized benefits with publicized costs. For instance, any taxpayer funded bailout.
- ilyt 3y ago
  Tax the corporations more than the people would be a good start. Make profits from savings in manpower go back to the social programs, maybe ven universal basic income.
  - thefz 3y ago
    Banks can evaporate billions and nobody bats an eye. Zero persons responsible, zero persons to prison while the most vulnerable always pay the price for it.
- hgs3 3y ago
  My own pet idea for economic reform would be to have people democratically vote on the services they want and if there aren't enough volunteers/robots/AI to perform them then you draft people. In this scenario people will get the services they themselves are willing to put in the work for. Such a system wouldn't need money, would be fair, and technological advancements would bring freedom.
blitz 3y ago
More apt to assume they think they’d be mind meld by Replicators than benefit from their development.
hgs3 3y ago
Exactly this. Advancements in technology should better peoples lives not destroy their livelihoods. We shouldn't suppress technology, but rethink the role of our economy.
kypro 3y ago
So many problems with this line of reasoning. For one, it's not even clear that democratic politics can work post-AGI. Democracies work because together citizens hold more power than any government or any other individual or collective in society. In the past that was largely expressed as physical power, and why things like gun ownership was important because it allowed the collective to revolt against their leaders, but in more recent times our collective power comes from our economic power. In a world in which governments can just print money with AGI, then they don't need us. In fact, in this world we're just leaches on state resources and space. And now the dynamic shifts from the state be dependant on the people to the people being dependant on the charity of the state. I see no reason to believe that this would be a stable long-term arrangement. Also, what you're saying is just hopeium. In reality we don't have this economic system. So AGI is going to be bad for us. And how are you going to change that? Are you going to strike when you're unemployed? Is the government realistically going to be able to tax an AGI company which is doing $100T in revenue 95% of profits? Why wouldn't they just relocate or lobby for lower tax? Secondly even if we assume by some miracle we can change the economic system and tax companies 95% without them relocating or lobbying to reduce taxes, have you considered that some people actually want to work? I've been poor most my life. The idea of being a state dependant doesn't really bother me, but what does upset me is that I've spend 20 years of my life skilling up in a profession which will now have no value. And no knowledge professions can ever have value again in post-AGI world. Perhaps I can go into a manual labour job for a little before manual labour starts being automated too. And then maybe after that the only jobs that will remain are a handful jobs where interaction with real human is valued (hospitality, etc). Perhaps we're just spoilt in the present because we have so many cool jobs. Today people genuinely like working and want to work. I got into coding not because I had to for financial reasons but just because I loved doing it in my spare time so I might as well be paid to do it. But maybe we need to just accept that this was never a sustainable dynamic and that the economic benefits of AGI out weigh us living a fulfilling life...
ericmcer 3y ago
Yeah it will ultimately lead to a better life for everyone but technological disruption has always been totally destructive to the generation it is replacing. Like the coal miners who Obama said should “learn to code”. Getting rid of coal is a huge net win but it sucks for them.
dyno12345 3y ago
the beauty of systems that don't actually exist is you can always think through how they would actually work later
- HyperSane 3y ago
  My solution would be progressive tax rates proportional to the gini coefficient used to fund a UBI
Herval_freire 3y ago
What do you mean by fairly distributed? If all my machines are better than you intellectually and all my machines are stronger and faster than you physically... Then it is completely fair for me to not give you any wealth because the machines out perform you. People fear AI because the fair outcome is in fact detrimental for a good portion of humanity. That is the paradoxical irony. In theory to save people you must function as a welfare state with things like ubi. You must deliberately distribute income unfairly. The practical course of action goes against our moral instincts.
- dns_snek 3y ago
  > In theory to save people you must function as a welfare state with things like ubi. You must deliberately distribute income unfairly. This is only true for perverted definition of the word "fair" which allows owners/investors to perpetually capture 99.9% of the value produced by people who research, develop, build, and operate "your" machines. When this is your ground truth, I can see how you would perceive a truly fair distribution of value created through thousands of years of collective human ingenuity, creativity, and hard work, as "unfair". Particularly in a post-singularity world where AGI and robots replace the majority of human work.
  - Herval_freire 3y ago
    Right so if I'm a janitor and I use chemicals to clean things which is the result of hundreds of years of human ingenuity and chemical engineering I suddenly owe humanity money? No. That is the perverted idea. I'm simply talking about fair as in fair trade. As in what is defined as a fair trade and a fair transaction according to economic theory and common sense. I am using the absolute most normal and most common sense meaning of the word "fair." You are the one in your words: "perverting" the meaning. Perversion is actually too strong of a word. I would say you are definitely twisting the meaning and using an uncommon and sort of made up definition. According to the most common usage of the word fair those who own AI only owe what they paid for. If they give away money then the economy is becoming more socialist or in another words an even distribution of wealth, but certainly unfair in the eyes of capitalism and fair trade and the fair exchange of goods. Keep in mind though I'm not blindly supporting capitalism. The future of society may rely on a more practical but more unfair distribution of wealth. But we have to face the fact that such a distribution is fundamentally unfair.
cambaceres 3y ago
I don’t know what country you live in, but I can tell you how it is in Sweden. As a freelancer I pay appropriately 70% of what I charge in taxes. How high do you think taxes can get before people stop putting energy into raising their productivity?
- __pache__ 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - cambaceres 3y ago
    I’m still a high earner so I’m fine. I still have approximately $7500/month after my taxes are paid. That’s a lot since all medical care, 1 year parental leave, my kids education from kindergarten through high school etc are “free”, e.g. paid with my taxes. My point was not to complain but to say to the guy that claims that we need a new system with more wealth distribution that those systems already exist. There are a limit though to how high you can tax someone before they stop producing.
    - __pache__ 3y ago
      That's insane salary, props to you on that
    - fbrncci 3y ago
      I was earning similarly in Europe. The moment I realized how much tax I was paying (51% bracket), I moved to Asia to work remotely. I honestly don’t care what’s being paid from my taxes, but to me that amount felt like theft. I now pay ~20% while being well above 10k after taxes.
      - satvikpendem 3y ago
        This is why comparisons between the US and Europe regarding wages are always fraught. For some people, it makes sense to pay a lot of tax for the benefits it confers. For others, like you and me it seems, it is not really worth it to pay that much tax and not really receive the rewards. But everyone who discusses conflates some people's preferences to suddenly be everyone's preferences, and this is simply not a true comparison.
__pache__ 3y ago
??? What else can we do, save for reward merit and performance? Sorry technology made the horse obsolete, but uh, that's good .. performance goes up, potential to show merit goes up
- tekknik 3y ago
  > technology made the horse obsolete it did not, there are plenty of situations in which technology is less preferred to a horse (or mule), like say climbing everest or various other difficult terrains. it did reduce the amount of working horses though
  - __pache__ 3y ago
    Yes it did.
    - tekknik 3y ago
      Move any amount of equipment up a mountain or on public land and say that again.
      - __pache__ 3y ago
        ...??? Like by helicopter?
        tekknik 3y ago
        You cannot land a helicopter everywhere a mule can go. You clearly have no experience here.
        __pache__ 3y ago
        Why would you have to land? I hunt and fish and hike. ...ya know what, upon further consideration techno-horses are actually the future. AI augmented.. HorseGPT. You are right.
simonh 3y ago
The fact that anyone today thinks that any other economic system we’ve ever tried is any better than the one we have is a damning indictment of our education system.
- derefr 3y ago
  Who said anything about knowing any good alternatives to the current system that could be switched to? If it was that easy, some country would have done it already, and they’d be winning the OECD. I think the suggestion is rather that we are morally compelled as a society, to invest real effort into inventing something new to replace neoliberal capitalism. States could, for example, be sponsoring experiments to validate new economic models, through e.g. low-barrier-to-entry applications for charter cities and other autonomous zones, as long as the applicant can show that 1. there is a novel economic model at play, and that 2. the zone is being carefully monitored to collect data for analysis by the Economics department of a major academic institution.
  - simonh 3y ago
    Economic experiments are going on all the time. Basic income, profit sharing, kibutz, all sorts. It’s not as if every western country is economically identical either. Neoliberal capitalism runs the spectrum from America to Scandinavia, via France. One of the major advantages of neoliberal capitalism is it’s not exclusionary of alternative forms of economic organisation. It can exist very well alongside state capitalism, or almost anything else. After all individual freedom to organise as you choose is precisely its core characteristic. If you want to establish a workers collective, or whatever you like, there really aren’t any barriers to doing so. In fact they do exist, some have been very successful. That’s great, but the fact that they are vanishingly rare I think says a lot more about the inherent problems with such systems than they do about capitalism.
    - imtringued 3y ago
      Demurrage currencies face significant legal problems that hinder their adoption. It isn't impossible but who in their right mind would give 10 million dollars in funding to start a bank to end capitalism?
OOPMan 3y ago
Ah yes, I'm sure you have a solution from one of the most difficult problems ever? It's easy to condemn the system but without a solution you're just barking in the wind... Just to be clear, I also think there are major issues with "the system", but I also don't think this is an easy problem to solve or everyone would be living in magical happy land already...
- HyperSane 3y ago
  Extremely progressive taxation based on the gini coefficient that funds UBI.
mbar84 3y ago
When circumstances change, people's behaviour must change. People don't like to change, some even fear change. If some people are insulated from reality, such that they don't need to change, other people will have to bare the cost. There is no economic system that can spare us from the need to adapt.
fnl 3y ago
I am currently reading the late Daly’s 2014 book “From Uneconomic Growth to a Steady-State Economy” that seems to address exactly your concern for a more fairly distributed economic system. A real eye-opener that would require us to change three things to build a more sustainable economy and future: (1) stop fractional reserve banking and nationalize money again to avoid the very quantitative easing/tightening fiasco we are seeing today, (2) measure economic progress with a quality of life index instead of GDP to accurately reflect the cost of products/resources and put more emphasis on life quality improving services, and (3) replace the current international trade rules and system run by the IMF with a more equitable system where capital costs are accurately reflected at the source to avoid “outsourcing” problems to third world continues. While all three changes are difficult to achieve in our current society, I am amazed at how clearly Daly’s life work can outline how we could build a much more sustainable economy and healthier society. Maybe his amazing last summary book is of interest to others on HN.
- imtringued 3y ago
  I am sorry but fractional reserve banking isn't the problem, nor is debt based money the problem. You can't solve the problem without allowing interest rates to be negative when people want to pay off their debts at a faster rate than people wanting to spend off their credits/deposits. The problem is quite simple. Money has no maturity but debt has a deadline. This asymmetry causes problems regardless of whether you have a gold standard, full reserve fiat or fractional reserve fiat. In other words, if you can fix the asymmetry or eliminate the zero lower bound it doesn't actually matter what form your money takes.
  - fnl 3y ago
    I don’t think Daly is suggesting to move away from debt as an instrument in his work, only to establish a 100% reserve system for commercial banks, including the Fed. He was suggesting to nationalize money supply via the Treasury, to avoid bank runs and fiascos like they happened just now to CS and SVB. Apparently, this was already the direction of thought among some economists in the 1920s (like Frank Knight and Irving Fisher), but then got overruled by the eternal growth mindset that evolved during the Great Depression (which Daly claims leads to “uneconomic” growth). Printing money as an instrument should very much be available - but only to the Government/Treasury.

kofejnik 3y ago

Define “fairly”

pavlov 3y ago
The grandparent comment does contain a definition: “A […] system that […] would make people welcome better AI because they could be confident it would make everyone wealthier” That would be a fair system regardless of the specifics of how it’s achieved.
- neogodless 3y ago
  One clarifying point: Even when nearly everyone gets wealthier, if inequality grows, most people don't feel like it's fair.
  - Sakos 3y ago
    What matters is the real effects of being wealthier. If it means you and everybody else can afford a place to live, then "feeling" it's unfair just doesn't matter.
- nomel 3y ago
  Not that person, but I don’t believe that sentence approaches a definition of “fairly”. “Make everyone richer” is all fine, until you realize that you’re only a penny richer. But maybe it’s justified. That justification is what the “fairly” definition would require, and is extremely important.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  Well, then we have been living in a system that's as close to fair as possible since global individual wealth has been growing for a long time. The few times we had it shrink significantly over some period of time is when local populations attempted forced wealth distribution. Our present system, by this definition, is amazing!
  - bandyaboot 3y ago
    > Well, then we have been living in a system that's as close to fair as possible since global individual wealth has been growing for a long time. That’s a non-sequitur.
    - renewiltord 3y ago
      No it's not. If the property of fairness is that everyone grows wealthier then a system that makes everyone wealthier is a fair system. That's as close to a tautology as possible. The resulting absurdity is why OP was right to ask what fairness was: everyone has their own belief in it, oriented towards equality or proportionality or some notion of deserving.
      - bandyaboot 3y ago
        In order to claim that the system is “as close to fair as possible”, you would have to demonstrate that the system has optimized everyone’s wealth growth as much as possible. Something going up for a long time isn’t proof of optimization.
        renewiltord 3y ago
        Well, no you don't have to optimize each person's wealth growth. It could be incredibly uneven so long as you optimize the number of people whose wealth grows. And clearly, since it is better than every other method, it is the best by definition. If other things were not done it is because they were not possible: since possibility requires an agent to execute and since no agent succeeded in executing a better plan it is, by definition, impossible.
- buu700 3y ago
  Here's an idea: a UBI that's pegged to GDP and population. Make it comically small to start, like say 0.25% of GDP split evenly between all citizens. Based on 2021 US stats, that's $176 per person per year. That seems relatively unobjectionable regardless of your politics, even assuming that the % is likely to drift higher over time. With increasingly advanced AI and cheap energy, GDP would rise over the long run independently of population, ultimately increasing the UBI to a livable salary.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    Here is even simpler idea to make that feasible: Start actually taxing the corporations in a way that can't be trivially avoided. And don't tax them less than your own citizens. Maybe tax a bit of income on top of revenue. Maybe tax a bit more if income per employee is on high side.
    - buu700 3y ago
      If you're talking about a five-figure UBI, I don't think that would be simpler to pass through Congress. In terms of legislative complexity, I can't see how closing all major corporate tax loopholes would be simpler than implementing whatever minor tax revenue increase is necessary to offset a $176 UBI.
    - satvikpendem 3y ago
      Doing that is actually more complicated. There are a variety of questions regarding taxing them, and there are many more ways they could get around it. In contrast, an income tax actually collects revenue because people can't really get around having to pay it.
newaccount74 3y ago
Everyone gets as much as they need, everyone contributes as much as they can.
- d0mine 3y ago
  ^ communisme
- fabianhjr 3y ago
  to each according to their need, from each according to their ability
  - visarga 3y ago
    only works for media and language model data
- atomicUpdate 3y ago
  Why would anyone contribute more than is required to get what they need, if they’ll never see any benefit beyond that? I prefer a system where people that work harder get more so they can have what they want, rather than just the bare minimum to survive (which is presumably what is meant by “what they need”).
  - frozenfoxx 3y ago
    Ask anyone that contributes to open source. Some of us like to make the world a better place.
    - jtms 3y ago
      yeah but plenty of people contribute to open source because it leads to being able to make a good, solid living.
  - yoyohello13 3y ago
    > I prefer a system where people that work harder get more so they can have what they want That’s fine and good, but I think many people imply that this is how our current system works. Which is just not the case.
bmn__ 3y ago
The video "Wealth Inequality in America" <https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM?t=35 https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM?t=35> at timestamp 0:35 shows a definition most respondents to the question agree on.
HyperSane 3y ago
Increases in GDP are evenly distributed across ALL income brackets.

gazby 3y ago

Indeed.

wouldbecouldbe 3y ago

I mean I think that's with every system a problem. Not just ours. Wealth distribution has been a challenge since we've moved away from spending our day solely focused on gathering food / farming. Every shock to our current system will take time to adjust.

tharne 3y ago
> Wealth distribution has been a challenge since we've moved away from spending our day solely focused on gathering food / farming. Have you ever considered that this may be due to the fact that our brains evolved to exist in a world where our day is largely focused on gathering food? We're not well-equipped to exist in other modes.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Kapura 3y ago
  [citation needed] primates don't spend the majority of their day gathering food; there's not reason to believe early humans were different.
  - tharne 3y ago
    I said, "majority of the day focused on gathering food, not "spent gathering food". If this seems like an arbitrary distinction, allow me to provide an analogy. Most teenage boys spend the majority of their day focused on having sex, but very few of them spend the majority of their day actually having sex (if they're even having sex at all). As for a citation, ask anyone who's spent any amount of their life with not enough food available. If you ask them how much of their time is spent focused on getting food or thinking about food, or worrying about food, they'll probably tell you "most of it".
  - oezi 3y ago
    It certainly depends much on the regional setting. Humans pushed to the boundaries of landscapes which support their existence. If you are a hunter gatherer in fertile jungle setting you might make do with 2 or 3h per day of hunting or gathering. If you live further north or south or in more arid regions that might take more time.

pydry 3y ago

If we could just stop being economically gaslighted it would help. The economic system can't be simultaneously unproductive enough to require us to keep raising the retirement age and so productive that job loss is a big problem. It is possible that a political war on labor is being waged at both ends.

htss2013 3y ago
It's possible to have certain things be abundant and other things be scarce simultaneously, because technology doesn't make everything abundant at the same time. That means certain types of labor are abundant and others scarce at the same time as well. There may be a war on certain kinds of labor but having to raise the retirement age and having job losses from tech aren't evidence of it.
- pydry 3y ago
  >It's possible to have certain things be abundant and other things be scarce simultaneously This is so obvious it barely merits saying. >having to raise the retirement age You do realize that raising the retirement age also doesn't make "everything more abundant at the same time", right? Yet you internalized a belief that we have to do it when so much of the labor it would produce more of is already abundant. Why?
  - htss2013 3y ago
    >Yet you internalized a belief that we have to do it [keep laboring] when so much of the labor it would produce more of is already abundant. Why? If there is so much abundance and labor isn't needed, why is almost every country on Earth currently experiencing food inflation? Abundance would mean prices go down, not up. We would need fewer farmers, not more. Before you say it's being caused by corporate greed and price gouging, this is why I said globally. If for example Vietnam locally produces rice, and it's not even a capitalist country, there shouldn't be rice inflation there. Yet there is, and rice farmers in Vietnam aren't retiring because human labor and rice are so abundant. Why pretend that just because some things have become abundant with technology, we can make society wide proclamations about labor no longer being needed?

spaceman_2020 3y ago

Personally as a noob programmer, I feel like a superhuman because of GPT-4. Feel like my creativity has been unleashed and I can compete with the big boys.

hunter-gatherer 3y ago
I think that is where the scare comes from though. It used to be that churning out good code really did take a lot of experience. But as we lower that bar, the value a computer programmer has may begin to diminish. If everyone can spit out 200 lines of code in a day, thrn hiw valuable are you, really? I analyze malware for a living, and don't consider myself a strong developer, though I can write programs, obviously. As an example, this last week I had a task that I would normally have employed one of our developers to do because they do it better and faster. Instead, I used GPT. I effectively took a couple days of work from someone. This is all fone now becuase it is new, but after a few years managers may start to evaluate output of certain people and question the utility of having duplicative skills on payroll. To be clear, I'm not actually entirely sure this will happen. I think there was a similar discourse back in the days when excel was making the rounds because it brought "computing" to everyone-and it did. However, it wasn't catastrophic to the developer community in terms of employment.
- adventured 3y ago
  You used to have to be an expert/specialist to have direct access to a computer, or understand precisely how to give them commands to work with them over an expensive connection (and on a limited basis in terms of time and how many could do it). That scarcity wasn't a good thing. People are drastically more empowered with computing today, the barriers were dropped in a rather extreme way (compared to where it started), and that is a good thing. These are conceptual groupings of advancement. One layer of complexity is going to be removed (broadening access), there will be further advancement and complexity where the skilled group can navigate to in order to best unleash what they're capable of. Writing the vast majority of code isn't special or super difficult (it's time consuming and mildly difficult at worst; quite obviously there are exceptions to that). There are a million plus software developers in the US alone. It's time to add new layers of complexity and advancement. Those million software developers will have to evolve, again, myself included.

trashface 3y ago

Loss of income kind of understates the issue I think. I'm an already long term unemployed programmer, and I've been playing around with copilot. It makes me think I'll never have income again from that trade, and possibly no other related field. But otherwise agree, bad economic system is bad.

VeninVidiaVicii 3y ago

Interesting take — I also think these arguments come from a place where people have (subconsciously?) come to terms with doing something monotonous or repetitive to survive.

qaq 3y ago

Well maybe shift to "real world" professions will occur resulting in us addressing abysmal infrastructure and housing situation. I am looking at picking up a trade because of this coming shift.

spaceguillotine 3y ago
i did that, i got injured at work and now can't do physical labor. Trades are hell on the body and bosses will toss you aside without any care. Join a Union if you're gonna go into the trades, i would've had protection and better safety. I took so many people to the ER for work injuries that were preventable but the bosses skimp on everything.
- qaq 3y ago
  What would you say is the safest trade as far as risk of injury ?
  - user_7832 3y ago
    Not OP, but I’d assume something at a nuclear plant (or something else that’s govt owned.)
    - tekknik 3y ago
      Someone didn’t watch Chernobyl
      - user_7832 3y ago
        Fair point haha
  - great_psy 3y ago
    I would say electrician? Your biggest risk is electrocution and asbestos exposure.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

ACV001 3y ago

This is a general statement withour any substance. Provide an example. Are you talking about communism?

adventured 3y ago

> The fact that so many people fear loss of income as a result of better AI is a real indictment of our economic system. Or they're mistaken in their assessment of what's going to actually happen, as they frequently have been when it comes to technological progress.

ilyt 3y ago
Well, every time it happened some people had their jobs made obsolete and were fired, and they had to find something else to do. And every time it happened the income inequality grew because the savings were mostly going as profits for the top levels of company. Yes, it hasn't been a disaster, but it clearly set some bad trends going.
HyperSane 3y ago
Wealth inequality in the US is already at absurd levels. The top 1% of Americans have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion (or 30.4% of all household wealth in the U.S.), while the bottom 50% of the population holds just $2.1 trillion combined (or 1.9% of all wealth). The Fed estimates that the wealthiest 10% of Americans hold more than 88% of all available equity in corporations and mutual fund shares (with just the top 1% controlling more than twice as much equity as the bottom 50% of all Americans combined).

breck 3y ago

Yes! So many people in information fields think that their relatively high earnings are a result of their economic contribution. The truth, which they are often mentally unwilling to face, is that their earnings are more do to being on the profitable side of Intellectual Slavery laws (copyrights and patents). The artificial scarcity created by these laws is what has generated such vast accumulations of wealth, not some intrinsic value to their unique creations. ChatGPT is exposing this uncomfortable truth to many people for the first time, apparently.

nextlevelwizard 3y ago

We haven’t come up with a better system.

breck 3y ago
Yes: open source. Open source has proved itself to be vastly superior to closed source development models. It does not generate obscene wealth disparities though—and some see that as a bug.
- adwn 3y ago
  > Yes: open source. Open source is not an economic system in the sense in which this term is generally used. > Open source has proved itself to be vastly superior to closed source development models. "Superior" by which metric?
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    And to add, many companies are going from open source back to proprietary licenses explicitly due to being unable to compete with closed companies like Amazon. Elastic, Sentry, and Docker come to mind. So any discussion of the super/inferiority of open source should include this phenomenon too.
  - breck 3y ago
    > Open source is not an economic system in the sense in which this term is generally used. We should move to a society where we look at software engineers as we look at road builders. City workers build roads, the people use those roads. Likewise, engineers build software, the people use said software. Our current system of (c)opywrong is bizarre and unnatural. > "Superior" by which metric? Well, I'm responding to your comment using an open source operating system running an open source web browser on an open source platform and you will likely read it on the same. I still use a handful of closed source products (Sublime Text comes to mind) but that's the exception, rather than the rule. This is vastly different from 25 years ago. In the long run, licenses are for losers.

lumb63 3y ago

This problem isn’t specific to AI. Luddites were concerned about machines taking their jobs. Marx recognized the role of “capital” (of which AI is the intellectual type) in suppressing the incomes of the working class relative to the owning class. Both Marx and the Luddites conceived of different solutions. One solution (the Luddite one) is to eschew the technology. If nobody adopts the technology, nobody has to, but nobody can benefit. On the contrary, if anyone adopts the technology, all can benefit, but all also have to suffer the negative impacts. Without everyone on board, the Luddite solution cannot work. Marx saw a different solution: communism. If the state owns the means of production, the working class and owning class benefit equally. It’s unlikely that we ever move toward this, in my opinion, due to the other issues inherent to communism (unfair (from the perspective of most policy makers) distribution of resources, corruption, etc.). We need to find a new solution; one which enables people to benefit from technology while minimizing the downsides, or at least localizing the downsides to those who choose to adopt it. Right now we have, IMO, one of the worst situations of both worlds: privatized benefits with publicized costs. For instance, any taxpayer funded bailout.

ilyt 3y ago
Tax the corporations more than the people would be a good start. Make profits from savings in manpower go back to the social programs, maybe ven universal basic income.
- thefz 3y ago
  Banks can evaporate billions and nobody bats an eye. Zero persons responsible, zero persons to prison while the most vulnerable always pay the price for it.
hgs3 3y ago
My own pet idea for economic reform would be to have people democratically vote on the services they want and if there aren't enough volunteers/robots/AI to perform them then you draft people. In this scenario people will get the services they themselves are willing to put in the work for. Such a system wouldn't need money, would be fair, and technological advancements would bring freedom.

blitz 3y ago

More apt to assume they think they’d be mind meld by Replicators than benefit from their development.

hgs3 3y ago

Exactly this. Advancements in technology should better peoples lives not destroy their livelihoods. We shouldn't suppress technology, but rethink the role of our economy.

kypro 3y ago

So many problems with this line of reasoning. For one, it's not even clear that democratic politics can work post-AGI. Democracies work because together citizens hold more power than any government or any other individual or collective in society. In the past that was largely expressed as physical power, and why things like gun ownership was important because it allowed the collective to revolt against their leaders, but in more recent times our collective power comes from our economic power. In a world in which governments can just print money with AGI, then they don't need us. In fact, in this world we're just leaches on state resources and space. And now the dynamic shifts from the state be dependant on the people to the people being dependant on the charity of the state. I see no reason to believe that this would be a stable long-term arrangement. Also, what you're saying is just hopeium. In reality we don't have this economic system. So AGI is going to be bad for us. And how are you going to change that? Are you going to strike when you're unemployed? Is the government realistically going to be able to tax an AGI company which is doing $100T in revenue 95% of profits? Why wouldn't they just relocate or lobby for lower tax? Secondly even if we assume by some miracle we can change the economic system and tax companies 95% without them relocating or lobbying to reduce taxes, have you considered that some people actually want to work? I've been poor most my life. The idea of being a state dependant doesn't really bother me, but what does upset me is that I've spend 20 years of my life skilling up in a profession which will now have no value. And no knowledge professions can ever have value again in post-AGI world. Perhaps I can go into a manual labour job for a little before manual labour starts being automated too. And then maybe after that the only jobs that will remain are a handful jobs where interaction with real human is valued (hospitality, etc). Perhaps we're just spoilt in the present because we have so many cool jobs. Today people genuinely like working and want to work. I got into coding not because I had to for financial reasons but just because I loved doing it in my spare time so I might as well be paid to do it. But maybe we need to just accept that this was never a sustainable dynamic and that the economic benefits of AGI out weigh us living a fulfilling life...

ericmcer 3y ago

Yeah it will ultimately lead to a better life for everyone but technological disruption has always been totally destructive to the generation it is replacing. Like the coal miners who Obama said should “learn to code”. Getting rid of coal is a huge net win but it sucks for them.

dyno12345 3y ago

the beauty of systems that don't actually exist is you can always think through how they would actually work later

HyperSane 3y ago
My solution would be progressive tax rates proportional to the gini coefficient used to fund a UBI

Herval_freire 3y ago

What do you mean by fairly distributed? If all my machines are better than you intellectually and all my machines are stronger and faster than you physically... Then it is completely fair for me to not give you any wealth because the machines out perform you. People fear AI because the fair outcome is in fact detrimental for a good portion of humanity. That is the paradoxical irony. In theory to save people you must function as a welfare state with things like ubi. You must deliberately distribute income unfairly. The practical course of action goes against our moral instincts.

dns_snek 3y ago
> In theory to save people you must function as a welfare state with things like ubi. You must deliberately distribute income unfairly. This is only true for perverted definition of the word "fair" which allows owners/investors to perpetually capture 99.9% of the value produced by people who research, develop, build, and operate "your" machines. When this is your ground truth, I can see how you would perceive a truly fair distribution of value created through thousands of years of collective human ingenuity, creativity, and hard work, as "unfair". Particularly in a post-singularity world where AGI and robots replace the majority of human work.
- Herval_freire 3y ago
  Right so if I'm a janitor and I use chemicals to clean things which is the result of hundreds of years of human ingenuity and chemical engineering I suddenly owe humanity money? No. That is the perverted idea. I'm simply talking about fair as in fair trade. As in what is defined as a fair trade and a fair transaction according to economic theory and common sense. I am using the absolute most normal and most common sense meaning of the word "fair." You are the one in your words: "perverting" the meaning. Perversion is actually too strong of a word. I would say you are definitely twisting the meaning and using an uncommon and sort of made up definition. According to the most common usage of the word fair those who own AI only owe what they paid for. If they give away money then the economy is becoming more socialist or in another words an even distribution of wealth, but certainly unfair in the eyes of capitalism and fair trade and the fair exchange of goods. Keep in mind though I'm not blindly supporting capitalism. The future of society may rely on a more practical but more unfair distribution of wealth. But we have to face the fact that such a distribution is fundamentally unfair.

cambaceres 3y ago

I don’t know what country you live in, but I can tell you how it is in Sweden. As a freelancer I pay appropriately 70% of what I charge in taxes. How high do you think taxes can get before people stop putting energy into raising their productivity?

__pache__ 3y ago
[flagged]
- cambaceres 3y ago
  I’m still a high earner so I’m fine. I still have approximately $7500/month after my taxes are paid. That’s a lot since all medical care, 1 year parental leave, my kids education from kindergarten through high school etc are “free”, e.g. paid with my taxes. My point was not to complain but to say to the guy that claims that we need a new system with more wealth distribution that those systems already exist. There are a limit though to how high you can tax someone before they stop producing.
  - __pache__ 3y ago
    That's insane salary, props to you on that
  - fbrncci 3y ago
    I was earning similarly in Europe. The moment I realized how much tax I was paying (51% bracket), I moved to Asia to work remotely. I honestly don’t care what’s being paid from my taxes, but to me that amount felt like theft. I now pay ~20% while being well above 10k after taxes.
    - satvikpendem 3y ago
      This is why comparisons between the US and Europe regarding wages are always fraught. For some people, it makes sense to pay a lot of tax for the benefits it confers. For others, like you and me it seems, it is not really worth it to pay that much tax and not really receive the rewards. But everyone who discusses conflates some people's preferences to suddenly be everyone's preferences, and this is simply not a true comparison.

__pache__ 3y ago

??? What else can we do, save for reward merit and performance? Sorry technology made the horse obsolete, but uh, that's good .. performance goes up, potential to show merit goes up

tekknik 3y ago
> technology made the horse obsolete it did not, there are plenty of situations in which technology is less preferred to a horse (or mule), like say climbing everest or various other difficult terrains. it did reduce the amount of working horses though
- __pache__ 3y ago
  Yes it did.
  - tekknik 3y ago
    Move any amount of equipment up a mountain or on public land and say that again.
    - __pache__ 3y ago
      ...??? Like by helicopter?
      - tekknik 3y ago
        You cannot land a helicopter everywhere a mule can go. You clearly have no experience here.
        __pache__ 3y ago
        Why would you have to land? I hunt and fish and hike. ...ya know what, upon further consideration techno-horses are actually the future. AI augmented.. HorseGPT. You are right.

simonh 3y ago

The fact that anyone today thinks that any other economic system we’ve ever tried is any better than the one we have is a damning indictment of our education system.

derefr 3y ago
Who said anything about knowing any good alternatives to the current system that could be switched to? If it was that easy, some country would have done it already, and they’d be winning the OECD. I think the suggestion is rather that we are morally compelled as a society, to invest real effort into inventing something new to replace neoliberal capitalism. States could, for example, be sponsoring experiments to validate new economic models, through e.g. low-barrier-to-entry applications for charter cities and other autonomous zones, as long as the applicant can show that 1. there is a novel economic model at play, and that 2. the zone is being carefully monitored to collect data for analysis by the Economics department of a major academic institution.
- simonh 3y ago
  Economic experiments are going on all the time. Basic income, profit sharing, kibutz, all sorts. It’s not as if every western country is economically identical either. Neoliberal capitalism runs the spectrum from America to Scandinavia, via France. One of the major advantages of neoliberal capitalism is it’s not exclusionary of alternative forms of economic organisation. It can exist very well alongside state capitalism, or almost anything else. After all individual freedom to organise as you choose is precisely its core characteristic. If you want to establish a workers collective, or whatever you like, there really aren’t any barriers to doing so. In fact they do exist, some have been very successful. That’s great, but the fact that they are vanishingly rare I think says a lot more about the inherent problems with such systems than they do about capitalism.
  - imtringued 3y ago
    Demurrage currencies face significant legal problems that hinder their adoption. It isn't impossible but who in their right mind would give 10 million dollars in funding to start a bank to end capitalism?

OOPMan 3y ago

Ah yes, I'm sure you have a solution from one of the most difficult problems ever? It's easy to condemn the system but without a solution you're just barking in the wind... Just to be clear, I also think there are major issues with "the system", but I also don't think this is an easy problem to solve or everyone would be living in magical happy land already...

HyperSane 3y ago
Extremely progressive taxation based on the gini coefficient that funds UBI.

mbar84 3y ago

When circumstances change, people's behaviour must change. People don't like to change, some even fear change. If some people are insulated from reality, such that they don't need to change, other people will have to bare the cost. There is no economic system that can spare us from the need to adapt.

fnl 3y ago

I am currently reading the late Daly’s 2014 book “From Uneconomic Growth to a Steady-State Economy” that seems to address exactly your concern for a more fairly distributed economic system. A real eye-opener that would require us to change three things to build a more sustainable economy and future: (1) stop fractional reserve banking and nationalize money again to avoid the very quantitative easing/tightening fiasco we are seeing today, (2) measure economic progress with a quality of life index instead of GDP to accurately reflect the cost of products/resources and put more emphasis on life quality improving services, and (3) replace the current international trade rules and system run by the IMF with a more equitable system where capital costs are accurately reflected at the source to avoid “outsourcing” problems to third world continues. While all three changes are difficult to achieve in our current society, I am amazed at how clearly Daly’s life work can outline how we could build a much more sustainable economy and healthier society. Maybe his amazing last summary book is of interest to others on HN.

imtringued 3y ago
I am sorry but fractional reserve banking isn't the problem, nor is debt based money the problem. You can't solve the problem without allowing interest rates to be negative when people want to pay off their debts at a faster rate than people wanting to spend off their credits/deposits. The problem is quite simple. Money has no maturity but debt has a deadline. This asymmetry causes problems regardless of whether you have a gold standard, full reserve fiat or fractional reserve fiat. In other words, if you can fix the asymmetry or eliminate the zero lower bound it doesn't actually matter what form your money takes.
- fnl 3y ago
  I don’t think Daly is suggesting to move away from debt as an instrument in his work, only to establish a 100% reserve system for commercial banks, including the Fed. He was suggesting to nationalize money supply via the Treasury, to avoid bank runs and fiascos like they happened just now to CS and SVB. Apparently, this was already the direction of thought among some economists in the 1920s (like Frank Knight and Irving Fisher), but then got overruled by the eternal growth mindset that evolved during the Great Depression (which Daly claims leads to “uneconomic” growth). Printing money as an instrument should very much be available - but only to the Government/Treasury.