[FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

Mon May 17 06:31:08 EDT 2021

An editorial in the Boston Globe this morning notes that both Chelsea and
Cambridge, two cities adjacent to Boston, are experimenting with UBI to
reduce food insecurity:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/17/opinion/solution-hunger-takes-shape-chelsea-cambridge/

Analysis of the Chelsea program shows 75% of the money turns up spent on
groceries.  The editorial approves.

I think the government should provide a tax credit to businesses which
employ people at a living wage, to move the employees out of poverty, to
keep the businesses from being undercut by low ball competitors, and to
move the economy toward more sustainable wealth distributions.

-- rec --

On Sat, May 15, 2021 at 12:40 AM Pieter Steenekamp <
pieters at randcontrols.co.za> wrote:

> Glen,
> Re *Wow. That reads like good, hard science fiction. In my skim, the only
> thing I missed was an adversarial effort, positioning of white, black, and
> grey hatted *attacks*. There was plenty of waterfall-like structure for
> assessing vulnerability. But I missed the adversarial effort. Is it in
> there? If so, take pity on me and toss some clues my way.*
>
> Methinks I understand stuff on a very shallow level and you're the deep
> thinkin guy. I see the approach of the Finance 4.0 as focussing very much
> on participatory as opposed to adversarial effort, so on a shallow level I
> can't toss any clues to you. Instead of answering your specific question
> (because I really can't), let me ramble a bit on the proposed Finance 4.0
> system.
>
> Finance 4.0 is a spinoff of the European FuturICT 2.0 project and I quote
> from https://futurict2.eu/the-project-2/ :
>
> "To manage scarce resources and support endangered people and communities,
> powerful global information systems need to be built, based on big data and
> artificial intelligence."
>
> The FuturICT 2.0 project is a relatively big effort, the European Union
> takes it seriously.
>
> *Now to focus on Finance 4.0*
>
> Two (there are more, but in my view these two represents the very basic
> concepts) of the legs of Finance 4.0 are:
>
> * to use agent based modeling (ABM) as a primary tool to understand the
> economy and to design tools to manage it, because the the economy is
> considered to be a complex system where top-down analytical tools do not
> work well
>
> * to consider the human participants not as Homo Economicus as per
> conventional economic analyses but as  Homo Socialis.
>
> I'll talk very briefly about each of these.
>
> *Using ABM to understand and design tools for a complex system*
> Dirk Helbing has done very successful projects on traffic systems using
> the ABM to understand the dynamics of the complex system and then to use
> these insights to design efficient control systems for it.. From this he
> genaralises on complex systems (with good explanations) as follows:
> Two approaches to control a system are top down, central control system,
> like the government's control of money ánd bottom up control like in a
> swarm of ants.
> In traffic systems he found the following:
> A selfish bottom up control system outperforms the top down central but
> only up to a point. If the system becomes very busy and moves closer to its
> saturation point, the selfish bottom up approach breaks down and the top
> down  system functions better.
>
> But, if you have a local bottom up approach with local decentralized
> optimization considering local neighbors, it does not break down and
> outperforms the top down central control system over the whole spectrum.
>
> He argues that there are universal complexity forces at play and the
> complex economy will behave in a similar way. He gives good explanations
> (including the results of some ABM models) for this argument.
>
> *Second leg is to consider the human participant in the economy as  Homo
> Socialis*
> Conventional economic theory is based on considering the human
> participants as selfish agents Homo Economicus where each wishes to
> maximise his own benefits. Helbing argues that humans act more as Homo
> Socialis, each not only acting to maximise his own interest, but also
> considering others. Again he explains this approach in the document.
>
> A top down approach will work better as a financial control system over
> the whole spectrum (like we have now) if humans act like Homo Economicus.
>
> But a bottom up approach could be engineered that outperforms the top down
> control system, provided humans act like Homo Socialis. He goes into some
> details defending this assumption and of this design of the bottom up
> control system with local optimization considering local neighbors. (It's a
> complicated system, sort of like an expanded Bitcoin incorporating other
> factors that humans value like planting trees or caring for children. )
>
> Just a side-note, he considers Bitcoin to be a bottom up financial control
> system designed for where the participants are Homo Economicus. Although he
> does not say it explicitly he implies Bitcoin will not outperform the
> current central government's financial control system. (Note that I'm
> giving his views and it does not necessarily represents my own)
>
> In the words of the father of capitalism Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral
> Sentiments (1759)
> "How ever selfish man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles
> in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and renders
> their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it"
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, 14 May 2021 at 16:51, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Wow. That reads like good, hard science fiction. In my skim, the only
>> thing I missed was an adversarial effort, positioning of white, black, and
>> grey hatted *attacks*. There was plenty of waterfall-like structure for
>> assessing vulnerability. But I missed the adversarial effort. Is it in
>> there? If so, take pity on me and toss some clues my way.
>>
>>
>> On 5/13/21 11:59 PM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
>> > Finance 4.0—Towards a Socio-Ecological Finance System
>> >
>> > A Participatory Framework to Promote Sustainability
>> >
>> > Download link:
>> https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-030-71400-0.pdf <
>> https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-030-71400-0.pdf>
>> >
>>
>>
>> --
>> ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
>>
>> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
>> un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>>
> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
> un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20210517/fb02597f/attachment.html>