[FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

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One of the reasons I have trouble dealing with the logical connective "tonk" is the idea that it becomes a reasonable connective in logics where you abandon transitivity. This same problem rears in conceptions of N-ary agreements. For example, if Alice gives Joe a gift, then Joe re-gifts that to Sally, then Sally gives Alice a different gift, is that reciprocity? If we scope our lens to just Alice-Joe, or Joe-Sally, or Sally-Alice, it looks like altruism. But if we scope it to all 3, then it's balanced in some sense.

What role does transitivity play in reciprocity? Is reciprocity fundamentally different from transactionalism?

Any *-ism that fails to incorporate scoping and loop size (and loop density - as in Marcus' criticism of Kirkley et al) is fragile to this criticism. Perhaps one of the reasons these higher dimensional, low absolute size, societies don't scale is an inability to settle on such loop-scoping operators? This is one of the reasons I tried to generalize from "too each according to needs, from each according to ability" to some sort of spectral analysis.

One of the reasons to pursue something like smart contracts is to use computers to follow, find, and collapse loops, which is what Kirkley et al's algorithm did, however fragile it may be. I took Renee' to supper yesterday and *named* the act as a proxy for a Mother's Day supper that might have been hosted by one of her kids, had they lived anywhere near here. Was that reciprocity? WHEN, if ever, will I see a reciprocal gesture from her kids? Or, perhaps, the reciprocity comes from some homunculus inside Renee' ... filling in for some homunculus inside me? Can we imagine that's a collapse of a 3 dimensional simplex into a 2-tuple, facilitated by the homunculi?



On 5/11/21 6:43 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> The web of "economic relations" among human beings extends far beyond those that involve money. In some portions of that larger economy, the use of money is insulting (at best), often proscribed, and definitely debasing.  Think love, friendship, marriage, sex, ....  Would it be possible for a multi-disciplinary team (psychologists, anthropologists, mystics/alchemists) to study those realms of the 'economy' and devise a 'system' of roles and relationships that could comprise a 'system' useful in other aspects of the economy? Don't know.
> 
> Sometime ago I mentioned that anthropologists have identified three forms of exchange used by humans/cultures/societies: general, balanced, and negative. Market economies are, almost always, a subset of negative but can/have been based on balanced reciprocity.
> 
> Even a utopian non-monetary economy that remains at its core an instance of negative reciprocity will suffer from the exact same problems, and over time to the exact same degree, as capitalism using abstract money. Money is a technology, block chain is a technology and simply substituting one for the other will resolve no fundamental issue.
> 
> Money *IS NOT* the root of all evil. Evil *IS *the root of all money. Evil equals a combination of human individual venality and a system of negative reciprocity.
> 
> Could it be otherwise? I doubt it. Examples of economies that are based on general and balanced reciprocity, internally at least, do not seem to have scaled above a ceiling of tens-to-hundreds of thousands of participants. Could they grow larger, or be "nourished" in some fashion to enable scale? Don't know, but might be worth exploring.
> 
> The biggest impediment to change is, in my opinion, the individual human being.To illustrate: consider that almost every 'religion',  and certainly every 'major religion'', (Islam, Buddhism, Vedism, Christianity), incorporate and extol principles of general and balanced reciprocity and yet those principles are absent from the the vast majority of practitioners of those religions.
> 
> If every adherent of of those religions was a true believer who both embodied and practiced those principles it probably would not matter if the world economic system was capitalist, socialist, or other in format, because, in substance, it would be grounded on general and balanced reciprocity.

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