[FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

Tue May 4 14:16:51 EDT 2021

Ah, now THIS is the Glen I know and love. Your 10:00 post rekindled old rage concerning the incentive-value of money.  Here I go.  Up on my high horse.  Hi, Ho, Silver. Budda bump, budda bump, budda bump, bump, bump.

The very little Marxism I know tells me that it is the "triumph" of capitalism to reduce all relationships to money.  This seems right to rich people because the richer you get, the truer it becomes.  I can imagine Besos, Gates, and Musk falling asleep at night, musing about which of them will first reach a trillion.  If you've lost your soul and you've lost your wife, what else could they possibly want.  Such people even turn women into a kind of coinage.  (Cue Waspish Moral Outrage).   But isn't that the point of UBI; that it frees people to think about something else?  And yes, what IS this so-called "productivity"?  The "happy ditch digger" and the "carefree slave" are all part of the same self-serving capitalist iconography.  I am sure there are people who love to dig ditches, but if that's what they love to do, give them a thousand dollars a month for free and let them dig ditches for Habitat for Humanity in Peru, if that's what they feel like doing.  

Glen, keeping your ad hominem firmly in mind, I am again going to use your post as opportunity to flog my old work which argues that it is capitalism's reduction of all ambition to coinage that makes it so toxic.  

[end Rant]

Nick

Nick Thompson
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Tuesday, May 4, 2021 10:00 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

In an attempt to answer my own question (a), I found this article:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/tracking-wonder/201903/you-are-not-your-work

It's confirmation bias, for sure. But there are some interesting links. And I get to add "workism" to my basket of modern -isms, like scientism and wokeism. Seriously, though, with the "gig economy", it's difficult for me to imagine the person who drops off my food or Lyfts me home from the bar "derives their meaning of life" from that work. Most of them, and I try to talk to all of them, seem to believe it's the other way around, that their need for a job interferes with their ability to derive a meaning of life. (One such Lyft driver pumps out some super cool EDM and electronic trance, which he plays while driving us drunks around town -- good marketing. It's quite clear his meaning of life is not derived from his driving gig.)

A UBI to help sustain them through their derivation of a meaning of life seems so much more productive than any $ incentive we're applying by making them "buy" a car and depreciate it as they "make" that $. Although I disagree with the argument, one could argue that tipping exacerbates the problem, participates in the hoodwink that such gigs are in any way sustainable. A better answer is to allow them the resources to find more meaningful ways to use their time.

On 5/4/21 8:28 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> Hm. OK. If you'd prefer to talk about UBI (instead of my postscript), how about responses to these points:
> 
> On 5/4/21 6:35 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
>> a) How many people need employment for meaning? 10? 1M? How was that data gathered? Where is that data?
>>
>> Worse yet, in a world defined such that you *die* unless you're employed, it's circular reasoning to argue that employment gives meaning to life. The only way to escape such a vicious circle is by providing other options. What if people didn't die because they can't buy food, pay rent, etc?
>>
>> b) "The economy" is a diverse rhizome, not a needful entity. The concept of "productive" vs. non-productive work implies an optimization objective. What objective do you propose distinguishes productive from non-productive work? Is art non-productive? Is strip mining productive?
>>
>> c) In a world where some people live long lives accumulating billions (soon to be trillions - Musk? Bezos?) of US dollars, it's difficult to understand how it might be too expensive. The only way I can make sense of that argument is if you fundamentally believe in the argument that cumulative wealth is *necessary* for some tasks (like colonizing Mars). If you believe that society *must* have cumulative wealth stores (e.g. the government, Musk, Bezos, etc.) in order to achieve [your favorite objectives], then that implies the vast majority will need to be poor or near poverty. So, any attempt to "lift all boats" is "too expensive".
>>
>> But the constraining argument is that those crystals around which wealth accumulates have to come from somewhere. Efficient governments don't emerge by accident. We don't (yet) know how to engineer the emergence of Musks and Bezoses. That implies that we need a diverse pool of talent, most of which will end up non- or less than optimally productive. But some subset of which will be kernels needed for making progress on [your favorite objectives]. And that diversity includes non-productive people who can't pay rent, buy groceries, etc.
>>
>> Therefore, UBI is necessary for [your favorite objectives].

--
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

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