[FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

Tue May 11 12:29:02 EDT 2021

I think davew is right.

Almost certainly Money *IS NOT** the root of all evil. **Evil **IS *the
root of all  *EVIL* -- although it's not clear to me that *Evil IS the root
of all money.*

*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 vast majority of practitioners of
those religions.*

*If every adherent 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.*

Yet, even in a utopian society of people who all embodied and practiced the
principles of balanced reciprocity, it would *still *be a challenge to
allocate goods, resources, and human effort in a way that satisfies
everyone.

*It's unlikely that everyone would agree even with good-faith decisions
made by davew's ideal people about what balances what.**  How would such
disagreements be resolved?*

It seems that the only solution might be to forgo even balanced reciprocity and
build a society of people who appreciate and are satisfied with whatever
they get. This would be a world based on gratitude and selflessness rather
than reciprocity.

-- Russ

On Tue, May 11, 2021 at 6:46 AM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm>
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.
>
> davew
>
>
> On Mon, May 10, 2021, at 1:58 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> >
> >
> > On 5/10/21 12:10 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> > >
> > >     • 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.
> >
> > That's a reasonable point, as was Dave's w.r.t. belief in the
> > supernatural being an encoding for norms. But norms aren't good enough.
> > What's needed is more like what EricS invoked way back when in the
> > context of economic mobility. We need an (maybe more than a few) error
> > correcting mechanisms for when the norms are shown inadequate or
> > obsolete. And it seems to me that scientific knowledge is the most
> > stable kind of knowledge. Not "stable" in the sense of never changing,
> > but stable in the sense of being *founded* ... on solid ground. A
> > constitution is pretty good. But, again, our current problems with
> > "originalism" and "living document"-ism show explicitly how that can
> > fail.
> >
> > >     • 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?
> >
> > Yes. On the one hand, there are credible arguments that the technology
> > "stack", as it were, increases degrees of freedom versus decreases
> > degrees of freedom. So, perhaps in the vein of von Hayek (and Pieter),
> > any bureaucracy we put in place might be, necessarily, a limiting
> > structure rather than a freeing structure. It would be arrogant to
> > assume an engineered structure does a better job at some objective than
> > a "natural" structure. This principle takes the stance that our
> > structures can increase the degrees of freedom.
> >
> > >     • class is a cultural construct; we create it; hence we can
> eliminate it
> > >
> > >         Is this controversial?
> >
> > Yes. There is a significant number of us who believe in meritocracy,
> > where poverty can be an *indicator* for something you deserve ... even
> > to the extent that some people seem to believe you might have done that
> > in a *past life* or somesuch nonsense. This principle attempts a kind
> > of "blank slate" or "universally capable" conception of initial
> > conditions. The principle isn't well-worded, though, like the rest of
> > these. It partly implies that, e.g., if you're born blind, the world
> > and our society are complex enough so that you can be just as, if not
> > more, productive and meritorious as a sighted person.
> >
> > >     • 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.
> >
> > Yeah, I don't like the wording of that, either. What I'm going for is a
> > generalization of "to each according to need, from each according to
> > ability", which I don't like at all. I'd like to formulate more like
> > the definition of an "ecology", where the waste of one is the food for
> > another ... or along the lines of the eukaryotic perspective on trees
> > Roger forwarded.
> >
> > --
> > ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
> >
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