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> that's an entirely different argument That's not an argument, that's just a remark. > Right now we're debating whether natural habitats can be protected whi

• ETH_start 3y ago
  >Not with animal agriculture in the world we have (population growth, developing regions, overshoot, existing levels of deforestation and biodiversity loss etc.). Not this very instant of course, but nothing on that scale—including your plan of capping/reducing meat consumption—can be done in an instant. A transition to mass-nuclear-power and vertical farms would dramatically reduce the damage human civilization does to natural habitats while enabling massively more consumption. >I don't think people have much choice to live how they'd like. People having a choice between more consumption and less consumption is ubiquitous, and people almost always choose the former, because it almost always confers a higher standard of living. This idea that you have that a higher standard of living is possible with less consumption shows your ideas are removed from reality. >If we're discussing UBI and degrowth, we must consider abolishing money as we know it now for various reasons. I was using money as a yardstick for the value of economic resources consumed by each individual. If we eliminated money and moved to the Communism that it is now apparent you support, the economy would collapse, and we'd see mass-impoverishment. Money enables far more sophisticated economic coordination than would otherwise be possible. It is one of the important innovations in human history: https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CDROM/Literature/LOTwinterschool2006/szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/C... >Firstly, economics is not what most people think it is; it's a pseudoscience with imprecise models that often ignore negative externalities, such as environmental impacts, GDP is a meaningless metric, and the entire financial system is rigged. Conspiracy theories like this form the basis of any fringe movement. >Why is it rigged? A significant portion of the money in the economy is credit/debt, created by banks when someone takes out a loan. This is a misguided trope. Money is created by issuing credit against real world assets, like houses. This enables larger-scale economic coordination as people with surplus resources are able to invest those resources in enterprises in need of resources that raise future productivity. >Around 40-70% of people are employed in bullshit jobs. These jobs are unnecessary or even harmful, consuming resources for commuting and job-related needs. These are speculative theories, and on the basis of this speculation, you're making massive leaps of logic about how the world works. Next time you advocate a reduction in meat eating, you should disclose the fact that your advocacy is premised on conspiracy theories and radical social plans, like economics being a pseudoscience used to legitimize exploitation, and eliminating money and substituting it with central economic planning bureaus being the best way forward, respectively. People deserve to know that the basis of the changes you advocate are fringe theories utterly rejected by mainstream Economics. >Yet (almost) nobody dies of hunger (in our countries, anyway, nor should they) and (almost) everyone has a roof over his head, when the day ends. It's all a matter of distribution. People die from the daily grind associated with privation, in the form of non-existent or sub-standard housing, processed low-nutrition food, or the long-commutes and physically punishing jobs needed to avoid that privation. >The problem is distribution, nothing else. A portion of goods produced will always be lost to waste. Your solution of nationalizing all production in the name of better distribution would still have sources of waste, and it would destroy the complex interconnected web of private arrangements that incentivize and sustain both production and the investment needed to maintain and expand the capital stock that enables current productivity levels. >>>innovation to invent new healthcare technologies that can end the scourge of cancer, heart disease and other major illness is proportional to the productivity >>Scientists would still work even with UBI. Doctors would too, as well as teachers and artists. They are all motivated by factors other than money. And they would be compensated too. You need to learn basic economics. The reason we have a much larger population, and a much higher proportion of the population able to work in non-primary-production, in pursuits like medicine and scientific research, today, than we did 5,000 years ago, is higher levels of production, and higher levels of per capita productivity. Productivity maps directly to the resources expended on innovation >Currently, only 2% of people are employed in agriculture (and provide food for the 98%). However, even if we needed 6% for a more sustainable plant-based agricultural food production, under UBI, we could find individuals who would be happy to move from meaningless jobs to work in nature. Jobs exist because they are needed. You over-simplify how an economy works and assume you could just eliminate entire categories of jobs that a naive observer might assume are useless—like say insurance brokers—without dire consequences for the economy. People are not going to pursue the plans you envision. They have their own interests that they pursue. When governments prohibit gambling, illicit gambling emerges with corrupt government officials and organized crime controlling it, and that new substitute systems generates far more negative externalities that siphon off resources from pursuits that improve human civilization, like science and engineering. This kind of unintended consequence from utopianist social re-engineering plans is the rule, and the reason socialist/communist economies so under-performed relative to ones based on people being free in the market secure in their ownership over their private property. UBI funded out of an income tax is an overly simplistic formula that not only adversely affects incentives, but also becomes increasingly better gamed over time, leading to competitive energies being diverted to economically wasteful activities like tax avoidance (which is an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year now). >People are not doing this now because they need to sustain themselves, and the current system doesn't allow for it. The "current system" is just the physical reality that people need to produce economic resources in order to be able to consume economic resources. The alternative to people coordinating through voluntary contracts that leverage commodities like money to achieve production is everyone being subordinated to a simplistic plan imposed on every one, where incentives to manage resources carefully due to private ownership are eliminated, and have to be substituted with people's supposed altruism. There's a reason why a significant fraction of the food generated in the USSR came from the small portion of land the government set aside for private ownership. Private ownership lends to a vastly more effective economy than any other paradigm.