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This is one of the best arguments for Universal Basic Income there is. If your basic needs are met, you don't need to worry that your startup failing will land
by toss1 11mo ago
This is one of the best arguments for Universal Basic Income there is.
If your basic needs are met, you don't need to worry that your startup failing will land you hungry in the streets. Startup life is living mostly at work and without frills anyway, but for people with money (or if it existed, UBI), if it fails, they at least will have the basics of housing, food, and healthcare and can continue on with life.
Having UBI for everyone would unleash the talents of the entire range of the populous, not only the prosperous few. Conceivably, the expansion (Cambrian explosion) of new advances could pay for itself in economic growth for society.
- FloorEgg 11mo agoIn theory, I agree with this wholeheartedly. I have no idea if it's true in practice.
- toss1 11mo agoSeems like we should run the experiment Worst case, everyone ends up with the means to be housed, fed, and have healthcare
- amundskm 11mo agoThat is a lot of hand waving for some very complex and disruptive economic and social changes.
- fragmede 11mo agoSame goes for communism, theoretically.
- FloorEgg 11mo agoI have theoretical reasons why I think communism can never work. The reasons why I suspect communism will never work don't seem to apply to socialism/capitalism with UBI.
- krapp 11mo agoI think communism tends to fail at the scale of states because the end goal of capitalism is statelessness, and states being what they are use communist ideology to centralize and entrench their power, rather than liberate people from them and render themselves obsolete. Ironically you see much the same thing with small government/libertarian ideology in the US, and "free market" capitalism, where deregulation and "reducing government waste" tend to benefit capitalists and politicians and remove rights and access from the people.
- FloorEgg 11mo agoAs someone not an expert in capitalism but generally curious and knowledgable across a lot of subjects, my biggest skepticism of communism is that I don't see parallels to it anywhere in nature. When I reflect on the patterns that seem to repeat across levels of abstractions (physics, chemistry, biology, psychology...) is there any example of a mechanism that evolved towards optimal that resembles (even roughly) the basic shape of communism? I haven't found one yet, but if there were one I would expect it to show up in how cells in complex multi celled organisms (e.g. humans) organize themselves and manage resources. In other words, it someone can make a compelling case that a system in our bodies regulating our cells at large scales has strong parallels to communism, I'll be more inclined to think communism has a role in optimally regulating human behavior at scale. What I know is far far less than what I don't know, so it's possible there are many examples I just haven't come across yet. Whereas I can see parallels to capitalism (free market competition and cooperation) all over nature. Note I'm not making a moral argument here. I'm trying to use an understanding of the universe and nature to get an intuition of whether communism is a hallucination or an optimal algorithm, and if it is an optimal algorithm in which contexts is it optimal?
- fragmede 11mo agoWhy don't bees or other hive animals qualify as communism for you? The worker bees aren't doing their job for money, but for the betterment of the hive.