[FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

Fri May 7 10:02:30 EDT 2021

Russ,

Your intuition is partly correct: these societies, for the most part, were embedded in an extensive cultural web of kinship, norms, rituals, world-view — like any culture or any people. It appears to us that their culture was more pervasive, expressed more consistently, and "enforced" more dramatically, but that is not necessarily true. It would be the case that those participating in those cultures would not experience their culture as, in any way, oppressive. In fact, they would be just as oblivious to their culture as we are to our own.

None of these cultures were authoritarian in any sense. Leadership was situational - a "war chief" when threatened, a "forager chief" during the harvest season. The only permanent leadership position would be the "shaman" who was, more often than not, female.

Some of the societies were hierarchical and authoritarian to some degree, like the Inca. But even they were able to establish and maintain a vast trading network from southern Chile to Meso-America and even into what is not the southwest US - all without money. Quiipu, knotted strings, recorded facts or information, like how much of what commodity was sent where by whom, but no concept of money or 'exchange rate'.

All of these societies were 'brittle' in the sense that none of them survived encounter with European colonizers.

If you ever have the inclination, explore water management on Bali. The indigenous culture allocated water among rice fields based on a complicated system of myths, rituals, and interpreted omens, a classical intra-cultural solution, The Dutch came along and implemented a "scientific" water management system and immediately lost 50% of rice production and initiated a decade of near starvation before they gave up and let the priests take over water management again.

Bali is an excellent example of how an optimum solution to a complex (in the SFI sense) problem "evolves" over generations of trial and error with successes preserved via myth and ritual.

A related curiosity (for extra credit) — in every hunter-gatherer society of which anthropology is aware, the men hunt and the women gather.  To date, no one has been able to explain why. It cannot be explained by maternal roles or physical capacity. The range of theories proposed and debunked over the years is quite large and often very amusing.

davew

On Thu, May 6, 2021, at 10:20 AM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> Thanks, David.
> 
> I have no background in Economic Anthropology and am interested in hearing about societies that function effectively without something like money. My intuition (perhaps wrong) is that the only ways to make that work over extended periods are rigid societal structures (enforced, perhaps by powerful, well-established cultural norms) or force/power (as in authoritarian societies). In both cases, it seems likely (although, again, I could be wrong) that such societies will be quite static, inflexible, and brittle in the face of challenges. Are the societies you cite different from such paradigms?
> 
> 
> On Thu, May 6, 2021 at 7:30 AM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm> wrote:
>> __
>> Russ raised the question about alternatives to capitalism. A quick perusal of a good Economic Anthropology textbook can provide numerous examples. Many of which worked at a scale far greater than 150 people. Example: an Aboriginal economic system that incorporated multiple tribes in an area from the north coast of Australia to the interior of the continent; or, pre-Columbian Incas.
>> 
>> These systems were established and maintained by being embedded in the overall culture: i.e. because of a vast web of kinship, inter-personal, obligation, concrete resources, myth, and ritual. In contrast, modern economic systems (capitalism or Marxism, or ...) are divorced from "reality" and exist in a world of abstractions.
>> 
>> Christopher Alexander illustrated this distinction with regard to architecture and the difference between what he called the selfconscious and the non-selfconscious process of building. In the latter, the knowledge of how to build and maintain a house, for example, was embedded in myth and ritual and "common sense knowledge." Ideal designs, ones adapted to the context — physical and cultural — evolved over time and preserved by being embedded in the culture.
>> 
>> Selfconscious design is epitomized by academic schools of architecture where abstract concepts of design arise and "good" design is judged by conformity to the abstractions and is divorced from reality.
>> 
>> Similarly with economic systems. The root of all evil is money which is an abstraction. How much "wealth" is grounded in abstractions of abstractions of abstractions in capitalist economic systems? Marxism might be marginally better than capitalism simply because it has never had the time an opportunity to develop the same kind of meta-abstraction structures that are prevalent in capitalism.
>> 
>> Human evolved a left-brain and it is our ruination.
>> 
>> davew
>> 
>> 
>> On Thu, May 6, 2021, at 5:21 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:
>>> Hi Pieter,
>>> 
>>> Not that it matters (to anything), but No, zero support for Chomsky from me.
>>> 
>>> He is the archetype of a bully and a demagogue.  It was his MO in linguistics his entire career, a field that was susceptible to that sort of thing, and to which he has done great harm.  It’s a shame, too, because as you say, he is smart, and some of his early ideas were interesting and insightful.  
>>> 
>>> That is not an ad hominem to the side, it is a propos de his political writing.  I do think some of his criticisms of the predatoriness of the American system are correct, and they benefit from his intelligence and energy.  But I think your criticism that all he does is stand in judgment from the sidelines and not bear human responsibility for what happens when you get things wrong is just the right one.
>>> 
>>> Have you noticed that there are some people who seem deeply grounded in a concern for others’ wellbeing, and seem to work tirelessly to help?  I have the impression that, for instance, Karen Bass (a US congresswoman who was for a time considered for Vice President) is such a person.  The best kind of people who rise within civil rights movements and causes.  I am struck by how often they have no interest in blaming and judging; it is a distraction from the work they are trying to do.
>>> 
>>> On the other side, there are people who choose causes that may have righteous elements, but seem to choose them for the reinforcement of identity it gives them to stand in condemning judgment on others.  That is all I can see in Chomsky.  It doesn’t mean everything he says is wrong, and criticisms have a place.  But a premise that there is any kind of anarchism that doesn’t instantly get taken over by gangs seems way too anti-empirical to be claimed as a “smart” position.
>>> 
>>> But fair enough to argue the claims,
>>> 
>>> Eric
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On May 6, 2021, at 4:28 PM, Pieter Steenekamp <pieters at randcontrols.co.za> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> 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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