[FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

Thu May 6 03:28:41 EDT 2021

I have a little book On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky is IMO a very smart person and it's maybe worthwhile to pay
attention to his ideas?

Although I don't want to reject his ideas, my mind is open, I'm not
convinced it will work out as intended. The problem is he offers anarchism
as an idea without specifics of how to implement it and how the valid
concerns about it can be addressed.

At least, Chomsky's abhorrence of capitalism will maybe find fertile ground
among some members of this group?

On Thu, 6 May 2021 at 08:34, Russ Abbott <russ.abbott at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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