[FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

Wed May 12 10:29:44 EDT 2021

A very insightful and humane comment, David.

On Wed, May 12, 2021 at 8:50 AM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm>
wrote:

> I find anthropology to be fascinating because it is complex,
> interpretative, dynamic, highly contextual, and, ultimately anecdotal. "The
> ways of humans" are not reducible to formulae, rules, laws, or algorithms.
> There are 'patterns' and it is possible to establish cultural 'norms' to
> which — always with exceptions — individual behavior conforms.
>
> "Thinking Anthropologically" means constantly juggling hundreds of
> variables, trying to find the "familiar in the strange" and the "strange in
> the familiar" and, at best, discovering that your "understanding" is just a
> "thick description."
>
> In contrast, from my point of view, science cherry picks the easy shit;
> that which is reducible to answers, laws, principles, and algorithms. Make
> no mistake, I love science, but only at the fringes where it remains
> "metaphor and story and philosophy."
>
> It is difficult to introduce anthropological ideas, like the three
> categories of reciprocity, into discussions on this list. Readers come up
> with questions, framed with too much specificity to be easily answered —
> like glen's question of transitivity in balanced reciprocity.
>
> The answers to such questions are almost always: yes   ....but ....
>
> When Jesus (supposedly) said, "if you do it to the least among you you
> have done it to me," that is transitive as I understand glen was asking.
>
> "Balanced" is highly contextualized. For example the group of workers that
> had lunch together every Friday. Restaurants varied in price, everyone
> ordered what they wished, and the check was always evenly split. At the end
> of a year of study, the anthropologist observing the group added up the
> numbers. The total spent by the group and the amounts spent by each
> individual. Individual expenditures were within ten-cents of the amount
> calculated by dividing total expenditure by number of people in the group.
>
> A Bill Mauldin cartoon: two GIs in WWII are talking and one says to the
> other, "I want to thank you for saving my life today, here's my last pair
> of dry socks."
>
> Both cases exhibit balanced reciprocity.
>
> Most examples of general reciprocity are situated in small, tight, groups
> like a family and few point a path to a "scaled application." Bot others,
> like Pieters, "pay it forward" or numerous instances of altruism benefiting
> large, "anonymous," groups contain no obvious constraints on scale.
>
> Anyway - just something I wanted to share.
>
> davew
>
>
> On Wed, May 12, 2021, at 1:46 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
>
> I just want to share two stories with you regarding reciprocity.
>
> 1 Years ago I had to be in Miami for a couple of months for business and
> my family joined me. My one son was ill and got treatment at the Jackson
> Memorial Hospital. There was one nurse in particular that went not the
> extra mile but million miles to help us with everything that she possibly
> could. When it was time for us to return home we obviously wanted to
> express our gratitude. Her reply was to request us to do to others what she
> has done to us.
>
> 2 The deputy chief justice of South Africa Raymond Zondo had a similar
> experience in his life. His family was very poor and a local businessman
> helped so that he could study law. After completed his studies he wanted to
> repay the businessman, but in Zondo's own words:
> “When I asked him what arrangements we could make so I repay him, he said
> don’t worry. Do to others what I have done to you. I thought that was very
> important and in my own small way I try to do that,” said the judge.
> Taken from https://www.goodthingsguy.com/people/judge-raymond-zondo/
>
> On Tue, 11 May 2021 at 23:56, Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
> Lazily composing at least two upshots of this conversation (and the
> smart-contract parallel one):
>
> 1) I think Russ brought up what *I* thought was implicit in Reciprocity
> (though I understand why it is not  since I borrowed my use of the term
> from gift economies, not adhering to the (obvious) mathematical meaning
> that most here would jump to):   My intended connotation of Reciprocity
> included both "spirit of generosity and gratitude", so it is excellent that
> those were called out as possibly essential (or at least efficient?) in
> improving the state of our relations.
>
> 2) Glen opened the question of "transitivity" which I think you (Jon) are
> addressing here with good motivation.   In my smart-contract
> considerations, the point would be that the values one attached to "raw
> value" (money/crypto¢) in their transactions would propogate through.   For
> example, food stamps cannot (directly) be redeemed for non-food items
> (specifically alcohol, tobacco, pet food, sunglasses) and if I paid a 500%
> surcharge on the few gallons of petrol I run through my Extended Range EV
> as a way to decline to participate in A) blood for oil wars and B) clubbing
> baby seals in the arctic, those crypto¢ would *avoid* the pockets of the
> warmongers and seal-clubbers and settle in the pockets of those who went to
> the effort to get their oil without that.   Of course, just like there can
> be black/grey markets in food stamps "hey buddy, I'll give ya $.50 on the
> dollar for those food stamps!",   there would surely appear
> money-changers/launderers who would *try* to cross-connect the drinking
> water with the black water for their own profits.   In principle, pervasive
> use of smart contracts *could* make that vanishingly harder and harder with
> adoption.
>
> 3) I knew "at least" would come in handy.   My intuitive conception of
> Reciprocity is that it is as much about back as forward propogation.
> SteveG will love the opportunity for a Dual Field encoding I think.    By
> taking Renee to dinner for Mother's Day, he not only acts as a proxy for
> her own children in some sense, I would like to believe he did it *because*
> Renee's motherhood has already been her gift to him... whatever benefits he
> gets from a step-role, from Renee being a better partner having raised
> children, etc. and that dinner is to honor and reciprocate for something he
> has *already received* from her (see 1 above, "gratitude").
>
> The spectral graph and circuit analysis Jon points to may well be
> useful/important for measurement/analysis of how well a system is working.
> Ideally the implementation is entirely local in the sense of agents on
> networks of transactions.
>
> Smart contracts are an implementation of distributed computation where
> computation (complex decision making) is deferred to the last (or most
> appropriate) place in the network.  For example, the fueling depot that
> accepts my anti-war/anti-ANWR crypto¢ for petrol passes it to his wholesale
> source which passes it through the "circuit".... the gas pump owner doesn't
> need to know (or share or even have an opinion on) what "values" are
> embedded in my crypto¢, he simply takes his "service cut" on the
> transaction as does each other middleman right up to the guy gently
> scooping teaspoons of bubbling crude out of an artesian well to run through
> his handmade still.   His still produces no better (maybe worse)
> heptane/octane than BP or ARCO but he *still* gets paid (ultimately by me)
> for so gently milking the dino juice from the earth for me.
>
> - Steve
> On 5/11/21 3:21 PM, jon zingale wrote:
>
> I have failed to follow this discussion very closely. That said, to what
> extent could frameworks like those that underlie spring rank
> <https://github.com/cdebacco/SpringRank> or gauge-theoretic price as
> curvature <https://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.3043.pdf> give reasonable
> characterizations of reciprocity over circuits? To what extent does
> Levine's
> <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/002251938090288X>
> (painfully straightforward) solving for eigenstates?
>
> * Apologies for any paywalls, I am often stymied to find better access.
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