[FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

[David Eric Smith]

Yes, agreed, Russ, with amendments.

I wrote some long awful thing on this yesterday and had the good manners to delete without sending.

I think capitalism isn’t even about money; there are two issues: capitalist property rights and monetary or financial layers in the economy.

I know Glen doesn’t like the terms “means of production”, but we can capture a big subset with an everyday term like “tools”.  Tools are durable things, built at cost with the intent that they can be repeatedly used.  They are not a monetary store of value, but they are, in other material senses, a store of transformational power over things one wants to transform.

But as soon as there is a tool, there is a decision problem over how it can be used and by whom.  I think “ownership rights” is the name we give to any solution to (meaning, “commitment to some protocol for”) that problem.  With ownership then comes at least an incentive, and in many real, limited-information settings, a realized ability, for the de facto owner of a tool to guide where the productive output using the tool goes.  It’s kind of the default basic-layer dynamic that follows from tool creation and tool ownership.  We can understand how tricky that instability can be to manage from study of these intricate and fancy mechanisms in hunter-gatherer societies to blunt the concentration of power (arrow-sharing that guides who gets meat; the kind of thing Sam Bowles studies).  Ownership provides a channel for itself to concentrate, and to concentrate other things (obliquely, referring to “wealth” by whatever measure).  That seems to me the essence of the capitalist problem, which then takes various forms depending on social institutional choices.

It seems to me that we don’t want to give up tools, so we can’t give up the problem of committing to some solution for ownership, and with that, we have to face up to the complex problem of regulating against the tendency of ownership to concentrate its de facto power by redirecting the proceeds of things produced.

This is why I don’t buy, as an empirical matter, Pieter’s optimism about things’ becoming too cheap to meter.  In some ways, and in projections to some dimensions, yes, that is a fair description.  Computer operating systems used to be pay-per-version, now many are free.  Communication used to be charge-per-use, now much of it is paid for by advertising (“free” only in an extreme distortion of what dimensions carry value, but nonetheless one that has taken most people some years to become aware of).  But the very way the rise of the concentration of wealth in the Tech sector before, and even more grotesquely so during the pandemic, is raising all the old arguments about the capitalist class, seems to me to show even in quite abstract domains of information and coordination services, that tool ownership has default instabilities that always act unless we can find effective regulatory strategies to blunt them.

In this sense I think Glen does make the most important point, which is that if there is a strong argument about UBI, its context is overwhelmingly about the problem that innovations in absolute output seem always coupled to concentrations of inequality.  Relative to that, almost everything Shapiro said in that piece was tropes that, at 15 places in the short talk, gave me an internal impulse to go cite the person who shows they are tropes by providing the good-faith and well thought-out counterargument.  It is a bit sad that Yang doesn’t feel able (and maybe isn’t able) to take that bull by the horns and say that this is where the UBI question lives.  


To me, money is a somewhat separate question: a mechanism for the distribution of permissions, communication, authority, etc., which makes certain coordination problems tractable that otherwise wouldn’t be.  I don’t think we want to give up the ability to use that, and even if some did, so many others don’t that there probably is no path for society that keeps it gone.  But, as many in the thread have so well said already, money is a terrible dimension-reducer, and the problems of “store of transformation power” that come with tool ownership, then take on new versions as “store of value” which is a kind of exchangeable access to ownership rights over everything.  But again, if we either can’t or (I will accept the position of) don’t want to give up what it allows us to do, we again face the complexity and difficulty of inventing or evolving (in whatever combinations) regulatory strategies to try to limits its default instabilities.

Anyway, to say I agree with Russ’s motivation to push this point.

Eric




> On May 6, 2021, at 8:15 AM, Russ Abbott <russ.abbott at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Earlier, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ said: If we're stuck with capitalism, then I'm for UBI. If we can get out from under capitalism, then I'm not.  Nick added: it is the "triumph" of capitalism to reduce all relationships to money. 
> 
> I wonder if this is not assuming that there is an alternative to what you are calling capitalism. As uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ points out, co-ops can work on relatively small scales, but if we are going to live in groups of larger than ~150 people, how are you imagining that we will arrange interactions without something like money? Even on small scales, how will a collective without money organize itself in anything other than a very static structure? And on larger scales, what is the organizing principle other than power? It's not clear to me how an alternative that uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ is supposing possible will actually work.  uǝlƃ ↙↙↙, would you mind elaborating what you have in mind?
> 
> -- Russ Abbott    
> 
> On Wed, May 5, 2021 at 2:17 PM jon zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com <mailto:jonzingale at gmail.com>> wrote:
> Yeah, I think it is safe to say that "huge costs" are a sign of progress in
> the same sense that smoke is a sign of fire.
> 
> 
> 
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