[FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

Tue May 11 12:37:36 EDT 2021

Russ writes:

< 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. >

Easier if people stop believing in their agency.

Marcus

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Tuesday, May 11, 2021 9:29 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

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<mailto: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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