[FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI
Russ Abbott
russ.abbott at gmail.com
Mon May 10 15:10:07 EDT 2021
I went looking for your 5 principles.
• civilization is already a cooperative enterprise, it's just a matter of
cooperation's extent/ubiquity
Agree. That's one of the reasons Trump's norm-breaking was so destructive.
• there's nothing supernatural, so all solutions have to be built on science
Agree there is no supernatural. I don't see that implies that "all
solutions have to be built on science." Most of our norms are not
science-based.
• innovation, technology, culture, etc. are limited only by nature; so in
principle the things we build (including governments) can be as big and
complex as the natural world
Is this controversial?
• class is a cultural construct; we create it; hence we can eliminate it
Is this controversial?
• the spectral signature of organization sizes is present in nature and
should be mirrored in society (e.g. power laws for org sizes, small-world
networks, etc)
Not sure what you mean by this. If you mean that it's important to be aware
of advances in our understanding of complex organizations, I certainly
agree.
-- Russ
On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 11:53 AM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
> OK. If you changed that to say that one of the functions social mechanisms
> like contracts happen to implement are money-facilitated transactions, then
> that would've been fine. But by proposing the 5 principles I did, I was
> attempting to answer your question of what a society might look like
> without (or with drastically fewer) money-facilitated exchanges. I know we
> can go a lot farther than we have, including relying more on co-ops and
> less on for-profits, including drastically increasing contractual tools
> (like the "plain language" movement), like adding ethical sections to
> standard artifacts like research publications, ensuring publicly funded
> research is freely accessible to the public that funded it, etc.
>
> Can we push that to an ultimate limit where no money is ever used? IDK.
> Just because I can't yet envision its practical details doesn't mean we
> can't build it up from principles. I'd enjoy doing that and Dave's provided
> a good start by outlining prior cultures, even if those particular ones
> don't scale. Would we want to completely eliminate money? Probably not. I
> don't toss obsolete tools from my toolbox just in case they're not as
> obsolete as I thought.
>
> The question is less about eliminating money and more about relying on a
> reductive hyper-focus on money and being led by our noses into ad hoc
> responses like UBI. UBI is like tossing a hammer to someone who needs to
> change a tire. Wrong tool, dude. But thanks. Maybe I can trade it for a lug
> wrench?
>
> On 5/10/21 11:35 AM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> > Sounds like we're not disagreeing too much. You wrote, "By saying the
> purpose of contracts and laws is to spell out additional details of
> money-facilitated transactions ... that that's the purpose of laws, etc. is
> putting the cart before the horse. We've gone too far, put too much
> emphasis on the money and not enough emphasis on the otherwise mediated
> relationships between various parties. Money is a means, not an end, a
> tool, not the purpose to which a tool is put."
> >
> > If I said, "purpose," I should have said "function."
> >
> > Laws typically trump money: OSHA, etc. A company can't (honestly) buy
> its way out of providing safe working conditions or selling contaminated
> food. I think that's appropriate. It's not clear to me that I'm "putting
> the cart before the horse" as you say.
> > _
> > _
> > __-- Russ
> >
> > On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 11:15 AM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:
> gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote:
> >
> > No, I'm not *quite* complaining about the reduction of money to a
> quantifier. My objection extends further to the ability of any particular
> money (e.g. wooden chits) to stand in, as a mediator, for what it helps
> trade. Your espresso machine is not *merely* worth $1000. That is the
> reduction I'm complaining about, a reduction that the accumulation of
> capital relies on.
> >
> > And, as I've qualified several times, mediating value stores *do*
> facilitate transactions, perhaps even to an extent that we will *never*,
> could never, eliminate it. As I've said since the beginning of the UBI
> thread, I don't *know* if we can eliminate money. But it would be useful if
> we could reintroduce more diversity into our media of exchange.
> >
> > But, I object to your assertion that we have contracts, laws, etc.
> to flesh out the details that money doesn't cover. That's not *why* we have
> contracts, laws, etc. We have those things to support the larger
> *foundations* of society. That they support money-facilitated transactions
> is a symptom, not a cause.
> >
> > Socially responsible mutual funds are one example of reintroducing
> variables into the calculus by which we accumulate capital. Pressuring
> Georgia-based corporations into making public statements about voter
> suppression in Georgia is *another* example. Actually attending annual
> shareholder meetings for publicly traded corporations, and expressing your
> opinions about the company's activities is yet another way. Carbon offsets
> are yet another example. Dave's mention of shunning is another. The
> examples of introducing these variables are everywhere. That you don't
> acknowledge them when they're pointed out is worriesome. You asked how we
> can trade contracts without money. I provided an answer. You go on to cite
> a definition of money. Weird. It's like a laser-focused attention on money
> to the exclusion of all else.
> >
> > Anyway. My only point, here, is to push against the tendency to do
> what you've just done. By saying the purpose of contracts and laws is to
> spell out additional details of money-facilitated transactions ... that
> that's the purpose of laws, etc. is putting the cart before the horse.
> We've gone too far, put too much emphasis on the money and not enough
> emphasis on the otherwise mediated relationships between various parties.
> Money is a means, not an end, a tool, not the purpose to which a tool is
> put. And like any tool, it sits in a (large) equivalence class of
> particular tools, each of which can play the role. And which tool you
> choose biases what happens as a result. And if you don't deliberately
> *choose* the tool, just fall into using it by accident, then you'll be
> biased in a cryptic way.
> >
> > If you still don't see how a complex society can get along with
> *fewer* money-facilitated transactions, then I'm tilting at windmills. How
> many fewer? I don't know. But some, at least. Asserting that because we
> can't eliminate it all doesn't argue that we can't eliminate most of it.
> The perfect is the enemy of the good.
> >
> >
> > On 5/10/21 10:34 AM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> > > As a medium of exchange, I think of money as something like a
> ruler. You can use it to measure things, to compare the measurements, and
> to exchange things for tokens of units of such measurements. Certainly,
> such a measurement is not a complete description of the thing measured. Is
> claiming that a measurement of a thing is equivalent to the thing itself
> what you are referring to as reduction? I doubt that anyone would take that
> position. So if you are arguing against that, I think it is something of a
> red herring. No one seriously takes such a position.
> > >
> > > Still, money is extraordinarily useful for facilitating exchanges
> that would be very difficult to arrange otherwise. Of course, if it's a
> complicated exchange one generally needs more than a ruler. That's why we
> have contracts, laws, etc., to spell out the additional details. I
> certainly agree with you about that. But I still don't see how a complex
> society can get along without something like a money-like ruler as a way to
> establish basic comparisons as at least the starting points of many if not
> most exchanges.
> > > _
> > > _
> > > __-- Russ Abbott
> > > Professor, Computer Science
> > > California State University, Los Angeles
> > >
> > >
> > > On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 9:21 AM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <gepropella at gmail.com
> <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:
> gepropella at gmail.com>>> wrote:
> > >
> > > Using wooden chits *and* US dollars limits overly reductive
> conceptions of money. It's fine to play word games and point out ambiguity
> in the usage of the term "money". But it should be clear that, like with
> languages, having diverse types of money is less reductive than 1 type of
> money. I'd no more want to rid the world of Yen than I'd want to rid the
> world of, say, Farsi. Here lie many of our disagreements about hooking one
> nation's money to another nation's money.
> > >
> > > Options are contracts. You can trade contracts without money.
> We do it all the time with, say, "quit claim" deeds. While the overwhelming
> majority of these trades use money, my claim is that money isn't
> *necessary*. Of course, it may be effective and efficient.
> > >
> > > This conversation is about the accumulation of capital and UBI
> as a band-aid to help maintain a society under the tendency to accumulate
> capital. In that larger conversation, reduction to a singular, grand
> unified measure like a single money, like USD, washes away the variation in
> ways to store value. Storing value in Yuan, as opposed to Euros, actually
> means something (at least Putin thinks so). Similarly, storing value in a
> .25 acre plot of land with a fairly maintained building on it is different
> from storing value in gold. Although they can all be *thought of* as money,
> only a capitalist does so. The rest of us think, say, our espresso machine,
> is different fundamentally from our pickup truck.
> > >
> > > On 5/10/21 8:22 AM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> > > > As you say, your alternatives are "money writ large." So how
> does that eliminate money? It just changes its form.
> > > >
> > > > I don't understand how options further your position. How do
> you trade them without something like money?
> >
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