[FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

Thu May 6 02:33:25 EDT 2021

Eric, You explained many of the problems in much more depth and detail than
I did. Well done. Thanks.

On Wed, May 5, 2021, 4:46 PM David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:

> 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> 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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