[FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

Wed May 5 09:34:00 EDT 2021

Reminds me over another author

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski

On May 4, 2021, at 9:12 PM, Pieter Steenekamp <pieters at randcontrols.co.za> wrote:

  I'd like to address a point Nick made earlier:

Well, the first step would be to make a distinction between "progress" and "change", with the former being a subset of the latter.  Now, the task is to see if there is any way to define "progress" transculturally.  For me, culture bound as I am, hand and foot, the wordprocessor program was progress because it made it easier to do the things I love to do, and facebook was regress because it demanded I do things I did not want to do.

I'm quoting from https://rootsofprogress.org/enlightenment-now, discussing Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now:

" the bulk of the book is devoted to an empirical analysis of human progress along several dimensions—practical, intellectual and moral—including:

Life: Life expectancy is up, from a world average of less than 30 years in the mid-18th century to over 70 years today; and the increases are seen by all age groups and all continents. Child mortality and maternal mortality in particular have been drastically reduced: “for an American woman, being pregnant a century ago was almost as dangerous as having breast cancer today.”

Health: The threat of infectious disease has been greatly reduced via sanitization, sterilization, vaccination, antibiotics, and other scientific and medical advances, which together have saved billions of lives.

Sustenance: Hunger and famine were a normal part of life throughout most of history. Today, people have access to, on average, over 2,500 calories per day (including an average of 2,400 in India, 2,600 in Africa, and 3,100 in China). And the extra food isn’t all going to the wealthy; measures of stunted growth and undernourishment are declining in some of the world’s poorest regions, and worldwide deaths from famine are also down. Technology was critical in this achievement: mechanization of farming, synthetic fertilizer (thanks especially to the Haber-Bosch process<https://rootsofprogress.org/turning-air-into-bread>), better crop varieties (thanks to Norman Borlaug and his Green Revolution), and now genetic engineering. The fall of Communism was also significant, since “of the seventy million people who died in major 20th-century famines, 80 percent were victims of Communist regimes’ forced collectivization, punitive confiscation, and totalitarian central planning.”

Wealth: Gross World Product was stagnant or slowly growing for most of human history, but it has grown “almost two hundredfold from the start of the Enlightenment in the 18th century.” And again, the increases are not only seen in a minority of the world. Western countries pulled away from the rest first, starting in the 18th century, in what is known as the Great Escape (from the Malthusian trap<https://rootsofprogress.org/the-malthusian-trap>). Pinker attributes this achievement to science; institutions that create open economies by protecting rule of law, property rights, and enforceable contracts; and a change in values that conferred “dignity and prestige upon merchants and inventors rather than just on soldiers, priests, and courtiers.” But the Great Escape was followed in the 20th century by the Great Convergence, as poor countries around the world catch up in economic progress and close the gap. In all, the portion of the world living in “extreme poverty” (using the definition of $1.90/day in 2011 international dollars) has fallen from almost 90% in 1820 to 10% today.

Safety: Deaths from virtually all kinds of accidents have drastically fallen. Deaths from motor vehicle accidents alone are down 24 times since 1921; pedestrian deaths and plane crashes are also down. Workplaces are safer. Deaths have decreased from falls, fire, drowning, you name it. Even natural disasters kill fewer people than they used to, as better technology and practices make us safer from everything from earthquakes to lightning strikes.

Quality of life: Work hours have decreased from over 60 hours per week in both the US and Western Europe in 1870, to around 40 hours today. Housework has decreased from 58 hours per week in 1900 to 15.5 hours in 2011, liberating everyone from drudge work, although owing to who historically has performed housework, this is in practice a great liberation of women. As a result, people report more hours of leisure, and more are retiring in old age. Not only our time but our money has been liberated: spending on necessities in the US is down from over 60% of disposable income in 1929 to about a third in 2016. And as a result of economic progress and better technology, people are doing more travel (including international travel), eating more varied and interesting diets, and have much greater access to the knowledge of the world.

Peace: In Pinker’s previous book<https://rootsofprogress.org/the-most-peaceful-time-in-history>, The Better Angels of our Nature, he chronicled the decline of violence and its causes. War between great powers has not occurred since World War 2, and the wars that rage today cover less of the world than in the past. Deaths are down from both battles and genocide. And violent crime has been reduced as well. He credits these declines to causes including the advancement of reason and education, the spread of global commerce, and international forums such as the UN.

Democracy: Democracy is taking over the world (that is, democratic republics, as opposed to authoritarian regimes). After suffering setbacks from socialist regimes in the mid-20th century, it is rebounding, with the defeat of Nazism followed by the fall of Communism. Two-thirds of the world’s population now lives in “free or relatively free societies”, vs. one percent in 1816 (according to projects that track this sort of thing, such as the Polity Project).

Equal rights: Racist, sexist, and anti-homosexual opinions are on the decline; “emancipative values” (such as freedom, autonomy and individuality) are growing more popular. Also down: hate crimes, rape / domestic violence, and child abuse / bullying.

Knowledge: Around the world, children are going to school longer, and literacy is on the rise. Women are closing the education gap with men, as more cultures decide to educate their girls. Even IQ scores are increasing (a phenomenon known as the Flynn Effect), likely as a result of the spread of education.

He makes this case with dozens of charts and far more data and analysis than a summary can do justice to, much of it sourced from Max Roser’s Our World in Data<https://ourworldindata.org/> and similar projects."

On Wed, 5 May 2021 at 05:42, <thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> wrote:
Dave,

No you can’t have read it.  Otherwise your life would have been completely transformed because you would have come to belief that sex- and mone- seeking are pathological distortions of human ambition.

I pretty sure nobody has read it because, so far as I know, nobody has been thus affected.  Ergo, …

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

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Tuesday, May 4, 2021 8:45 PM
To: friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

Diamond Age: Or, A Young Woman's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson

Required reading for any discussion of economics when the robots produce abundance, or things are too cheap to meter.

Nick won'ty read, pretty sure Steve and other already have.

davew

On Tue, May 4, 2021, at 3:31 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> I'm glad I held back from throwing in my own $.002 on this topic
> earlier... I like the general arc it is on and is being articulated much
> more gesturally than I think I am capable of.   I can't say I *fully*
> follow Glen's use of reduction and reconstruction in technical detail
> well, but it suggests an abstraction that rings hopeful if not
> (necessarily) true for me.
>
> Given that my trite belief that "when the road hazards are coming at us
> faster than we can see much less avoid, that we should pump the brakes
> and downshift" is based in an inapt (inept?) metaphor, and that in any
> case we aren't going to do a whole lot of self-limiting under the
> current aesthetic we (mostly) share (pedal to the metal and let 'er
> roar!).
>
> The Prepper/Survivalist community is mostly about trying to gather up
> the resources they think will help them survive a crash or more
> importantly the aftermath.   The post/transhumanists seem to be trying
> to figure out how to strapon (or grow out of their own bodies') wings
> and jet packs and road armor to escape or survive the inevitable crash.
>
> Careening vehicle metaphors aside, I'm pleased to hear more and more
> discussion that frames the economic aspect of "the culture war" as
> *post* rather than *anti* capitalism.  Whether technology makes
> *everything* too cheap to meter or not, I think the relative abundance
> of manufactured goods as well as commodities for the top 50% of the
> first world is confronting the *scarcity* model that was (maybe?)
> necessary to keep the engine (oops, vehicles made it back in) of
> consumerist markets accelerating.
>
> I am not sure that Yang has all (or even many) of the answers but I do
> give him great credit for having promoted the question on the national
> (and world?) stage with his run for President.   I had thought about UBI
> and similar mechanisms before but somehow his presentation or affect or
> maybe just timing brought it to me in a much more compelling way than
> before.
>
> I very much appreciate Glen's point about UBI being an intrinsically
> capitalist proposal to try to keep their system going as long as
> possible, I just hope we will use whatever time that buys us without
> significant disruption to plan out what things might/could look like on
> the other side of a revolution in (socioeconomic?) thinking that now
> seem inevitable to me.    When I used to ski (poorly), on any given run,
> there was likely a brief period of time when I realized I as absolutely
> going to crash and burn, and if I had any choice in the matter it was
> whether I was going to do it earlier rather than later and whether I was
> going to take a big bite of ice-slicked mogul, some off-run powder, or
> maybe a tree.    Maybe I'll just leap off a mogul and evaporate in the
> sunlight mid-air (Kurzweil's Singularity)?
>
> - Steve
>
> On 5/4/21 12:52 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> > Reduction. All things in moderation, including moderation. Reduction is a triumph, if it captures what you're looking for. And fiat currency has done great things for the world, a cultural technology that allows us to explore possibilities we wouldn't have otherwise explored. Financial instruments have allowed us to spread ownership across demographics that would never have been allowed based on real property.
> >
> > But those instruments are a reconstruction of the space that currency reduced out. And I think we're seeing that the reconstruction is trending dysfunctional. So, it's time to reconsider the initial reduction and, importantly, why the reconstruction isn't a cover for the original (full) space.
> >
> > We are doing that in both ad-hoc ways (e.g. the Psychology today article, finding other dimensions by which to bolster the reduction) and fundamental ways (e.g. transhumanist experimentation of "what are we"). UBI is a reasonable suggestion to reduce suffering. But, ultimately, it's a capitalist suggestion, proposed by *conservatives* who want to prolong the status quo, to milk the current system for as long as they can. That's OK, of course. We try to balance exploitation with exploration and nobody knows crisply when to emphasize which.
> >
> >
> > On 5/4/21 11:16 AM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2%40gmail.com> wrote:
> >> 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.
>
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