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Why the Tech World Thinks the American Dream Is Dying
- elbci 10mo agomaybe they finally discovered George Carling ;))
- ravelantunes 10mo agoIf AI automates most jobs and UBI becomes the primary source of income for most people, doesn't that imply the means of production eventually have to transfer to government control? Is there a different mechanism that makes this work without that transfer?
- youngtaff 10mo agoWhere’s the money for UBI going to come from when billionaires are hoarders and don’t like paying tax?
- VirusNewbie 10mo agoHow are billionaires “hoarders”? They may be a lot of things, but to use hoarders is a gross misunderstanding of wealth, billionaires, how equities work and more. Bezos does not have a castle filled with a scrooge mcduck moneypool. There are not castles filled with grain that could otherwise be used to feed the starving peasants.
- steveBK123 10mo agoDon't most of them have prepper level bunkers on large parcels of property, a private jet flight away in case things go truly south?
- luckylion 10mo agoPossibly, but those are irrelevant sums compared to their total wealth.
- steveBK123 10mo agoBezos has a $500M yacht thats longer than a football field
- aswegs8 10mo agoYeah but compared to the value they have in equities that are active companies, employing people, and generating value, these underground bunkers are small. If you have money you generally don't want it to sit around and depreciate instead of investing into real-estate, private equity, etc. directly or indirectly.
- Pooge 10mo agoVelocity would be much higher if the same amount of money was in the hands of millions more people. Corruption of politics would be much harder, too.
- VirusNewbie 10mo agoThey aren’t hoarding money, you don’t understand that? What “money” velocity would be higher? Some of these companies have very little profit compared to wealth.
- Pooge 10mo agoI perfectly understand that they don't have a swimming pool of coins and bills. However, that doesn't make them less rich by any means. Being illiquid doesn't mean they can't use that wealth.
- jgwil2 10mo agoBut "using wealth" precisely means spending money, doesn't it? That is to say, the opposite of hoarding?
- Pooge 10mo agoExactly. And guess what would happen if 1 million was divided between 100'000 people ? This would mean 10k per person and it's fair to say that at least half would spend (some of) it. Therefore, the velocity has increased. A person having 200 billion is not spending a big percentage of their wealth nor using it. Yes it's not cash but it doesn't mean it's unusable. I'm not against the ability to be rich; I'm against the ability to be that rich. The system isn't made to have such wealthy people. My country is one of the rare ones that has wealth tax and you just have to see where the progressive tax rate stops to see what I mean. This would probably get me sent to an American prison.
- VirusNewbie 10mo ago
- class3shock 10mo agoThey quite literally hoard the profit produced by the people that work for them. If they didn't, they wouldn't be billionaires. Pretending that because the wealth isn't in the form of a pool filled with gold coins that somehow makes it different is just misunderstanding wealth. As far as feeding people, he could single handidly fund SNAP for a year and still have 100 billion plus.
- VirusNewbie 10mo ago>They quite literally hoard the profit produced by the people that work for the Do you realize jeff bezos was a billionaire long before amazon recorded a profit? So quite literally no, this is not true.
- class3shock 10mo agoIm sorry, hoarding the value generated by everyone working at amazon. If you want to come up with another arbitrary distinction without a difference, be my guest.
- throw__away7391 10mo agoExactly. A whole lot of people have been sold this idea that "taxing billionaires" is going to solve all their problems and provide endless spending for all the free things they want, but this is simply not the case. First off, the math, even the naive math that assumes that all billionaires' stock can be instantly liquidated at the current prices does not work. As individuals these people do have quite a lot, but there are not enough of them. The politicians constantly mention the same 5-6 individuals with net work measured in the hundreds of of billions, then list the number of billionaires, but the vast majority of these "billionaires" are single digit billionaires, with their net work held in an extremely illiquid investment such as private companies. If you actually introduced your wet dream billionaire wealth tax that's going to pay for everything forever, all these people would be forced to go to the market at the same time and sell their assets while every other billionaire is also going to be in the same position at the same time, so who are they selling to? The market would crash (also incidentally impacting all your middle class retirement plans) destroying billions upon billions of dollars in wealth. But OK, let's say you get this money now, let's pretend you could get enough, and the government starts spending it on entitlement programs--what you have just done is convert investment into consumption. What do you expect to happen in this case? I'd expect surging inflation. Society effectively consumes everything that we produce. If we want to consume more, we need to produce more. The government can put their finger on the scale as to what is produced and who consumes it, the government can put policies in place that lead to additional production via removing obstacles from productive activities, introducing obstacles to unproductive activities, making investments or subsidies, etc. but all of this is more complicated and messy, it needs to be done intelligently and carries risk of distorting market realities leading to unintended consequences. This is called "governing" and it's what politicians are supposed to be doing. Outsiders who want power but can't effectively govern are always trying to sell people on these "one weird trick" narratives of easy fixes to hard problems. Bezos has, I believe, two jets and three yachts along with a number a large homes with large household staff. A lot for a person to be sure, but most of his wealth is unrealized investment in a company that delivers goods to hundreds of millions of people's homes and powers countless tech companies that are used by billions of people. Taking his boats and planes away is just not going to move the needle, it's not going to make groceries cheaper or reduce the price of college tuition or add housing stock (aside from a handful of luxury homes in a couple of neighborhoods around the wold) or add any new doctors to the medical field. Certainly taxes can be increased, but no one should expect this to make a real dent in the budget. We got into this situation by decades of taking the easy route, so of course people are looking for easy solutions. This is the exact same kind of magical thinking that the right uses to convince people that their life would be oh so much better if they just kicked out all the immigrants. There is no magic bullet, most spending by the government is on the middle class, most consumption is by the middle class (this is even more dramatic if you measure this in real world physical goods terms rather than including "luxury" markup on spending by the upper middle class). This is a huge group, hundreds of millions, that collectively consumes an unfathomable amount of resources, and moving some numbers around on a few computers in downtown Manhattan is not going to change this.
- nullocator 10mo agoBill gates owns over 250,000 acres of land spread across like 15+ states, idk what to call that if not hoarding. Don't pretend that because most of their wealth is termed as illiquid that it doesn't still count. It counts, they can access it and make use of their wealthy whenever they want. Rather than doing great good deeds, they are sitting on some cash and lots and lots of assets and their focus is on growing and expanding their wealth; that is hoarding.
- seanmcdirmid 10mo agoHis foundation runs agriculture research in places like rural Louisiana. He isn’t hoarding the property, rather he is putting it to use for the greater good. His foundation also has farms as investments, but these are agribusinesses that are in operation, they aren’t being left to lie fallow.
- Mountain_Skies 10mo agoIf the means of production are taken from the billionaires and given to the government, how long would their wealth last? Not sure handing the means of production to a government would be a viable solution as politicians and bureaucrats are humans and often very terrible humans at that, but I don't see how billionaires could continue to last very long once they no longer have control over anything other than a declining number of currency units.
- beeflet 10mo agohow are the means of production going to be taken? They have direct control of all of the robots.
- NortySpock 10mo agoUntil Congress passes a law nationalizing their company, and forces them to sell their company to a holding company owned by the government.
- beeflet 10mo agoThe government won't be able to force Robot Inc. to do anything. Robot Inc. has control of the robots, and the government has control over words on paper.
- danaris 10mo ago
- croes 10mo agoUBI and capitalism don’t match. Quite the opposite, capitalism even enforces useless work because it’s the main source of income. That’s why all these AI bros dreams of AI benefits are BS unless they think they could get rid of capitalism
- spwa4 10mo agoYou ignore human nature. I used to say "the brain is a transformer", not in the sense of how the current batch of AI transformers work, but in the sense of an mathematical transormation. The input gets transformed into human behavior. Human behavior is not something that exists independently of our environment and stimuli. And specifically: if nothing comes in, nothing comes back out (if you actually take away inputs, right up to the point that the brain stops controlling the body and you die, but you don't have to drive it nearly that far to just make sure nothing happens anymore). Perhaps surprisingly, humans don't object to that. Our human intelligence works by subtracting what we can predict from the inputs and then focusing on the portion that remains. So if AI either prevents interactions with humans or makes them more predictable, then human minds just ... stop. Literally. Humans won't do anything anymore. UBI will either fail, or it will succeed and humans will just stop.
- xhkkffbf 10mo agoNothing gets rid of capitalism. In the socialist world, various forms of status just replace basic currency. When goods are limited, there has to be some way to ration them. In the former Soviet Union, it was just high party officials who were rich in limited goods. Maybe they didn't have "money" or US-style "capital", but they had other things that took that role.
- aleph_minus_one 10mo ago> Quite the opposite, capitalism even enforces useless work because it’s the main source of income. If the work was really so useless, companies would love to become leaner (i.e. fire the employees who do useless work). It's rather the government who by its control freakery introduces lots of red tape for companies.
- xg15 10mo agoI guess the Tech Bro vision is that there just flat out won't be any interaction with money for the lower-classes anymore, because everything they need for living would be "free" (as in, provided by a set of perpetual "subscriptions" that don't require any direct compensation, but that tech companies can modify or even cancel at any point at their sole discretion)
- judahmeek 10mo agoThis is some good black mirror material here
- greyface- 10mo agoCurrency debasement is an option. Taxes would be less inflationary, of course.
- KingOfCoders 10mo agoRobots and drones will keep the masses in check.
- Mountain_Skies 10mo agoI'm far less worried about the consequences of automation than I am about the consequences of the chase for automation.
- analog31 10mo agoUBI could be packaged in the form of a jobs program. There's still plenty of work to do. AI can't protect our cities from immigrants. /s
- steveBK123 10mo agoIf AI somehow does materially, permanently change the amount of human employment required, I don't think anyone is going to like the outcomes. I am to the left politically, but I do not think UBI can work in practice for the majority of population due to human nature and the resulting lack of purpose. People do seem to have an innate need for purpose, and most people need one imposed on them by circumstances, it would seem. The % of people who will flourish and pursue their passions, given the means to pursue any higher purpose.. is stunningly low. They are the same people that are high-agency, intelligent, driven and will hustle in any job anyway. The best case outcome for the majority is sitting on their couch consuming AI slop entertainment infinitely, and I am not optimistic we'd even land there. The COVID bubble was the closest we've come in the US in terms of people having more time on their hands with less financial concerns (stimulus checks, employers subsidized to make payroll, unemployment payment increases, unemployment expiration extensions, federal benefit income caps raised, increased healthcare subsidies, student loan payment pauses, eviction moratoriums, etc etc). Unfortunately it seemed the outcome was less of human flourishing and more an increase in general disorder & disaffection. Likewise, after Capital having financed trillions in investment to deliver AGI is not going to hand over the money to find UBI willingly. Even people in the middle seem to be easily swayed by allegations of waste/scams in government benefits programs.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 10mo agoWell,with the big asterisk that people were not allowed to meet eachother. That seems like a big limitation
- steveBK123 10mo agoTechnically sure, in some places, for a limited period of time measured in weeks.. with many caveats. In practice not really, and certainly not 6-18+ months after March 2020
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 10mo agoI didn't meet essentially anybody beside my wife for almost 2 years, that was a lot (canada)
- general1465 10mo agoIt is either UBI with massive taxation of everyone who provides AI services and thus keeping facade of capitalism or outright communism.
- antisthenes 10mo ago> Is there a different mechanism that makes this work without that transfer? Yeah. Corruption.
- rimbo789 10mo agoBecause they killed it
- akyuu 10mo agoNon-paywall version: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/why-the-tech-world-thinks-the-american-dream-is-dying/ar-AA1UrHV6 https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/why-the-tech-world-thi...
- steveBK123 10mo agoMy favorite Tech Bro "AI is gonna make money worthless" cognitive dissonance is how Musk keeps saying exactly this. He has been quoted that people won't need to save anymore due to abundance, while also extracting a potential $1T pay package for himself... https://fortune.com/2026/01/12/elon-musk-retirement-savings-irrelevant-ai-robots-abundance/ https://fortune.com/2026/01/12/elon-musk-retirement-savings-...
- bryanlarsen 10mo agoMoney at that level is about power. Unlike what must of us use our money for, power is relative, it's a zero sum game
- therobots927 10mo agoWhat point are you trying to make?
- steveBK123 10mo agoYes so he advocates for & looks forward to a future where he has even more money (power) and the rest of us collectively have even less money (power).
- _fw 10mo agoHe needs the money for Mars bro Just a few hundred billion more We’re so close to interplanetary civilisation bro Just hundreds of billions more, just one last time
- goatlover 10mo agoCan he and his tech bros just go there already and leave the rest of humanity alone?
- jmyeet 10mo agoThe tech world as a whole thinks the American Dream dying is a good thing and they're actively making that happen. And the answer is quite simple: further wealth concentration and the resulting inequality. China is investing in infrastructure and making sure its citizens have enough to eat and a roof over their heads. The US is starving school children, unleashing its own Gestapo on its citizens, letting its citizens die, doing untold damage to every other country on Earth and letting our infrastructure rot so Jeff Bezos can buy a 4th megayacht. Automation and AI could be a good thing for society. We could all enjoy the benefits by having to work less and having to less menial and/or dangerous work. But it won't work that here. It'll be used to displace workers, increase the wealth of th etop 0.01% and suppress the wages of reamining workers. I'm unconvinced the trillions invested in AI will ever see a return. But even if it produces value in some way, will it even matter if nobody has any money to buy anything?
- steveBK123 10mo agoRight, look at what US (and the west in general) did over our long experience of ZIRP. Did we borrow at near-zero to build housing, transit, infrastructure, etc? No... but we got a boatload of SaaS.
- therobots927 10mo agoThe datacenters will be used for wide-scale facial recognition and real world surveillance. The tech demons got tired of being limited to spying on people’s online activities.
- gatkinso 10mo agoThe dream of a single family home (in SF) is dying
- aroman 10mo agoDying? It's been long dead for almost everyone for some time.
- anonymousDan 10mo agoI mean this is just dumb. Why would anyone respect intellectual property anymore in this scenario for example. And governments will invest everything they have to steal or copy the knowledge required to compete.
- parpfish 10mo agoI’m really curious how UBI would interact with the base emotional responses that drove a lot of our politics. The anti-freeloader impulse is one of the easiest ways to spur people to action. Would that go away or be intensified under UBI? would people cease to be charitable after a tragedy because they expect UBI to handle it?
- _vqpz 10mo agoAre people charitable after tragedies now? Anecdotally, most people I know don't feel like they make enough to make donations to others.
- beeflet 10mo agoI think it is a moot question because UBI and automation will destroy society as we know it through uncontrolled, malthusian growth. I don't think we will last long enough to see what long-term culture that results in. With infinite welfare, the dominant culture will be the one that is able to reproduce as much as possible, perhaps through cloning? We are already seeing IVF, surrogate mothers and other sorts of cloning/eugenics sexual strategies emerge, just not on a dominant level yet. If it wasn't for cloning, I would say it would look more like Calhoun's rat utopia due to sex-based competition. >The anti-freeloader impulse is one of the easiest ways to spur people to action. I would say this depends on culture. Only industrious countries tend to have culture with this impulse.
- foltik 10mo agoPeople aren’t rats. Overall fertility is strongly regulated by education level, labor opportunities, cultural norms, etc. If “infinite welfare” unavoidably led to a reproductive feedback loop, the richest, safest societies would already be there, which we don’t see. Your comment seems to rest on the unstated assumption that hierarchy between humans is an essential stabilizing force, and that abundance without it is unsustainable. I don’t think that’s an empirically settled conclusion.
- EMIRELADERO 10mo ago
- raincom 10mo agohttps://archive.is/1jgGr https://archive.is/1jgGr
- raincom 10mo agoThe West has started to destroy itself from the inside: Politicians and activists always focus on increasing incomes (increase wages) and increasing employment (full employment for everyone), while the cost of living (rent/mortgage, health insurance, auto insurance, etc) goes up. Reduce the cost of living as it helps all kinds of people.
- mc32 10mo agoJapan seems to have gotten there; in their case quite a bit is due to population decrease though. That’s probably viable in advanced economies but not in growing economies.
- postflopclarity 10mo agowe could afford a UBI now. I'm not sure why some people seem to think an AIpocalypse is a necessary precondition.
- onecommentman 10mo agoPoint of clarification: Silicon Valley is not the entirety of the “tech world”. Not even the majority of the tech world. It’s a significant, very noisy minority, focused on Information Tech World. Even on HN, that distinction needs to be made…maybe especially on HN. That sort of conflation will eventually lead to inane arguments that waste everybody’s time.
- red-iron-pine 10mo agothe tech world killed it, mate. AI is coming for you.