3 ms·

I 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

by beeflet 9mo ago

I 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 9mo ago
People 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 9mo ago
  Exactly. Here's Orwell speaking on the whole thing: > "An argument that Socialists ought to be prepared to meet, since it is brought up constantly both by Christian apologists and by neo-pessimists such as James Burnham, is the alleged immutability of ‘human nature’. Socialists are accused—I think without justification—of assuming that Man is perfectible, and it is then pointed out that human history is in fact one long tale of greed, robbery and oppression. Man, it is said, will always try to get the better of his neighbour, he will always hog as much property as possible for himself and his family. Man is of his nature sinful, and cannot be made virtuous by Act of Parliament. Therefore, though economic exploitation can be controlled to some extent, the classless society is for ever impossible. > "The proper answer, it seems to me, is that this argument belongs to the Stone Age. It presupposes that material goods will always be desperately scarce. The power hunger of human beings does indeed present a serious problem, but there is no reason for thinking that the greed for mere wealth is a permanent human characteristic. We are selfish in economic matters because we all live in terror of poverty. But when a commodity is not scarce, no one tries to grab more than his fair share of it. No one tries to make a corner in air, for instance. The millionaire as well as the beggar is content with just so much air as he can breathe. Or, again, water. In this country we are not troubled by lack of water. If anything we have too much of it, especially on Bank Holidays. As a result water hardly enters into our consciousness. Yet in dried-up countries like North Africa, what jealousies, what hatreds, what appalling crimes the lack of water can cause! So also with any other kind of goods. If they were made plentiful, as they so easily might be, there is no reason to think that the supposed acquisitive instincts of the human being could not be bred out in a couple of generations. And after all, if human nature never changes, why is it that we not only don’t practise cannibalism any longer, but don’t even want to?"
  - beeflet 9mo ago
    >If they were made plentiful, as they so easily might be, there is no reason to think that the supposed acquisitive instincts of the human being could not be bred out in a couple of generations. How would this be bred out without artificially controlling reproduction? What is the action here? The idea that individual pressure for resources would trickle down inter-generationally is lamarckian! Under a regime of UBI and Reproductive "Freedom", the most successful genes will simply be the ones that choose to reproduce the most, because there are no longer any social or resource limitations on reproduction. You get a totally opposite effect, where the reproductively greediest are the most successful at reproduction. It is a tragedy of the commons.
- beeflet 9mo ago
  Fertility is regulated by education, culture, and labor because it is driven by social interplay between sexes and available resources. Education, culture and resources are women's criteria for evaluating suitable men. UBI makes these criteria meaningless. Cloning and surrogacy removes the need for inter-sexual selection altogether. When you just have one guy cloning himself with government subsidy, there are totally different dynamics at play. The system of UBI changes the incentives to create this behavior. I am not even saying it is rat-like; In my previous comment I discussed the differences between our world and the rat utopia. In the rat utopia, reproduction is still limited by the interplay of sexes and you eventually get failure of the system through a breakdown of reproduction. It would be more accurate to describe the most successful strategy under UBI as "tumor-like", where the failure mode is based on a strain in resources. The richest, safest societies don't have infinite welfare because they have cemented a culture which rejects welfare, and reproduction is currently limited by either culture (women's expectations of their partners) OR resources (look at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-chinese-billionaires-having-dozens-of-us-born-babies-via-surrogate/ar-AA1Siy0B https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-chinese-billionaire... or what elon is doing). What happens when reproduction is limited by neither? We already see the effects of this in say, Africa where you have a massive population explosion caused by aid.
  - foltik 9mo ago
    > UBI makes these criteria meaningless. No, it doesn’t. You’re just assuming this is the case because it destabilizes the hierarchy you’re implicitly attached to. Notice the pattern: women’s preferences are just artificial constraints, meaning and agency are hand waved away, and what’s left is a simplistic model of mindless replicators constrained only by available resources. The dynamics of human society reduced to that of E. coli. This is not how reality works. This sort of fixation on “reproductive greed” mirrors market fundamentalism. Human behavior is collapsed into a single maximization drive which is circularly declared a law of nature. > We already see the effects of this in say, Africa where you have a massive population explosion caused by aid. The Africa example is a perfect example of post-hoc rationalization. You take complex demographic dynamics and use them to selectively justify a prior belief of “free resources cause collapse” rather than letting the data inform your priors. In reality fertility is much better explained by declining infant mortality, low female education, and labor incentives.
corranh 9mo ago
Population is declining in many parts of the world while productivity is increasing. That doesn’t sound like a world of scarcity. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/business/china-population-data.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FlA.-owj.6_RuqGV0CZtW&smid=nytcore-ios-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/business/china-population...
- beeflet 9mo ago
  We live in a world that is largely still pre-cloning and pre-surrogacy. It will take a couple generations for these new sexual strategies to propagate (for example https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-chinese-billionaires-having-dozens-of-us-born-babies-via-surrogate/ar-AA1Siy0B https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-chinese-billionaire...). I would describe the current state of disaster, where reproduction is limited by sexual competition and not by resources as similar calhoun's rat utopia. In the western world, it is also driven by market factors such as land ownership and cultural expectations around that. Whereas in china there are population limits resulting from the one-child policy (anti-malthusian policy). I maintain that my position in my previous comment is true in the large despite these local effects. In countries where you have a welfare system, you tend to see new strategies emerge after a couple of generations. In the USA, a significant number of african-american households are dependent on EBT. In Israel, the population of "Haredi" ultra-orthodox subgroup is subsidized and has grown year over year (https://youtu.be/ST_eZwBIMDA https://youtu.be/ST_eZwBIMDA). I suggest that it is largely a social effect, because it is effected by the rate of cultural diffusion between the welfare/reproduction maximizing subgroup and the broader society. But it still represents an adaptation.

by beeflet 9mo ago

foltik 9mo ago

People 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 9mo ago
Exactly. Here's Orwell speaking on the whole thing: > "An argument that Socialists ought to be prepared to meet, since it is brought up constantly both by Christian apologists and by neo-pessimists such as James Burnham, is the alleged immutability of ‘human nature’. Socialists are accused—I think without justification—of assuming that Man is perfectible, and it is then pointed out that human history is in fact one long tale of greed, robbery and oppression. Man, it is said, will always try to get the better of his neighbour, he will always hog as much property as possible for himself and his family. Man is of his nature sinful, and cannot be made virtuous by Act of Parliament. Therefore, though economic exploitation can be controlled to some extent, the classless society is for ever impossible. > "The proper answer, it seems to me, is that this argument belongs to the Stone Age. It presupposes that material goods will always be desperately scarce. The power hunger of human beings does indeed present a serious problem, but there is no reason for thinking that the greed for mere wealth is a permanent human characteristic. We are selfish in economic matters because we all live in terror of poverty. But when a commodity is not scarce, no one tries to grab more than his fair share of it. No one tries to make a corner in air, for instance. The millionaire as well as the beggar is content with just so much air as he can breathe. Or, again, water. In this country we are not troubled by lack of water. If anything we have too much of it, especially on Bank Holidays. As a result water hardly enters into our consciousness. Yet in dried-up countries like North Africa, what jealousies, what hatreds, what appalling crimes the lack of water can cause! So also with any other kind of goods. If they were made plentiful, as they so easily might be, there is no reason to think that the supposed acquisitive instincts of the human being could not be bred out in a couple of generations. And after all, if human nature never changes, why is it that we not only don’t practise cannibalism any longer, but don’t even want to?"
- beeflet 9mo ago
  >If they were made plentiful, as they so easily might be, there is no reason to think that the supposed acquisitive instincts of the human being could not be bred out in a couple of generations. How would this be bred out without artificially controlling reproduction? What is the action here? The idea that individual pressure for resources would trickle down inter-generationally is lamarckian! Under a regime of UBI and Reproductive "Freedom", the most successful genes will simply be the ones that choose to reproduce the most, because there are no longer any social or resource limitations on reproduction. You get a totally opposite effect, where the reproductively greediest are the most successful at reproduction. It is a tragedy of the commons.
beeflet 9mo ago
Fertility is regulated by education, culture, and labor because it is driven by social interplay between sexes and available resources. Education, culture and resources are women's criteria for evaluating suitable men. UBI makes these criteria meaningless. Cloning and surrogacy removes the need for inter-sexual selection altogether. When you just have one guy cloning himself with government subsidy, there are totally different dynamics at play. The system of UBI changes the incentives to create this behavior. I am not even saying it is rat-like; In my previous comment I discussed the differences between our world and the rat utopia. In the rat utopia, reproduction is still limited by the interplay of sexes and you eventually get failure of the system through a breakdown of reproduction. It would be more accurate to describe the most successful strategy under UBI as "tumor-like", where the failure mode is based on a strain in resources. The richest, safest societies don't have infinite welfare because they have cemented a culture which rejects welfare, and reproduction is currently limited by either culture (women's expectations of their partners) OR resources (look at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-chinese-billionaires-having-dozens-of-us-born-babies-via-surrogate/ar-AA1Siy0B https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-chinese-billionaire... or what elon is doing). What happens when reproduction is limited by neither? We already see the effects of this in say, Africa where you have a massive population explosion caused by aid.
- foltik 9mo ago
  > UBI makes these criteria meaningless. No, it doesn’t. You’re just assuming this is the case because it destabilizes the hierarchy you’re implicitly attached to. Notice the pattern: women’s preferences are just artificial constraints, meaning and agency are hand waved away, and what’s left is a simplistic model of mindless replicators constrained only by available resources. The dynamics of human society reduced to that of E. coli. This is not how reality works. This sort of fixation on “reproductive greed” mirrors market fundamentalism. Human behavior is collapsed into a single maximization drive which is circularly declared a law of nature. > We already see the effects of this in say, Africa where you have a massive population explosion caused by aid. The Africa example is a perfect example of post-hoc rationalization. You take complex demographic dynamics and use them to selectively justify a prior belief of “free resources cause collapse” rather than letting the data inform your priors. In reality fertility is much better explained by declining infant mortality, low female education, and labor incentives.

corranh 9mo ago

Population is declining in many parts of the world while productivity is increasing. That doesn’t sound like a world of scarcity. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/business/china-population-data.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FlA.-owj.6_RuqGV0CZtW&smid=nytcore-ios-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/business/china-population...

beeflet 9mo ago
We live in a world that is largely still pre-cloning and pre-surrogacy. It will take a couple generations for these new sexual strategies to propagate (for example https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-chinese-billionaires-having-dozens-of-us-born-babies-via-surrogate/ar-AA1Siy0B https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-chinese-billionaire...). I would describe the current state of disaster, where reproduction is limited by sexual competition and not by resources as similar calhoun's rat utopia. In the western world, it is also driven by market factors such as land ownership and cultural expectations around that. Whereas in china there are population limits resulting from the one-child policy (anti-malthusian policy). I maintain that my position in my previous comment is true in the large despite these local effects. In countries where you have a welfare system, you tend to see new strategies emerge after a couple of generations. In the USA, a significant number of african-american households are dependent on EBT. In Israel, the population of "Haredi" ultra-orthodox subgroup is subsidized and has grown year over year (https://youtu.be/ST_eZwBIMDA https://youtu.be/ST_eZwBIMDA). I suggest that it is largely a social effect, because it is effected by the rate of cultural diffusion between the welfare/reproduction maximizing subgroup and the broader society. But it still represents an adaptation.