D&D and the rising pandemic

[FrozenNorth]

Depends on where you are. If your country’s safety net is relatively straightforward, a UBI system might be more trouble than it’s worth in the short run.

The system proposed for the USA, otoh, eliminated or reduced nearly every agency and program associated with our labyrinthine “welfare state”, including numerous investigative and judicial oversight branches. That prunes thousands of pages of legal code and regulations down to the minimum needed to determine everyone got the right sized check- fewer loopholes, fewer ways to chest, less need for investigation, enforcement and court cases. Even without raising taxes, reducing the beaurocracy by that much was calculated to result in a net increase in benefit to the recipients.

I think you just hit upon why it would never be adopted. If it does what it is supposed to do, people might ask whether the tax system could also be overhauled to be simpler, fairer and with fewer loopholes...and that just won’t do!

 

[Umbran]

Mod Note:

Folks, watch the politics please. The political forces against UBI really isn't an appropriate subject matter.

 

[NotAYakk]

Power flows from the barrel of a gun.

Well, sort of. The barrel of a gun is useless unless you are pointing it at people, and those people are useful.

People being useful can always choose to die rather than consent. So it is the consent of the useful people that is power, and you can use a gun to attempt to get it.

So power flows from the consent of useful people.

This (one of the reasons) why democracy works (regardless of it being "good", I'm saying "works"); power aligns with electoral power, so you reduce the difference between nominal power and actual power. This helps prevent the structural forcing of revolution, or inefficient use of force to compel consent of the power of the people.

But in those "utopian" societies, people are no longer useful. They don't produce anything that a hypothetical dictator (individual or organization) wants or needs. If they have guns pointed at them, simply wiping them out doesn't hurt the people with the guns (materially); in fact, as they seem to economically be little but a drain on the productivity of the society involved, societies that do eliminate their surplus population end up with more "effective" economies. If that "effective" economy can compete with other economies and defeat, swallow or (memically) infect them, you run into a problem where this system grows, while ones that respect human rights shrink and lose.

In comparison, today when you point your guns at your people and you do wipe them out today, you end up with an economy that is destroyed. The people produce the wealth, so the consent of the people is the source of power.

So long as human rights hold, UBI solves the over-productivity "problem", but it misaligns both economic and political power with actual power. So a revolution is only being held at bay by the stability of society, and human-rights-less political system is in a more stable configuration...

---

Now, we can turn this on its head. For most of human history, power came from food. Peasants where valuable because they grew food. A few specialists didn't grow food, and produced something else. Today, 99% of the population of western economies is not food related. To someone in the food-dominated era this would be unbelievable.

So maybe we can transition to some other kind of value produced by people, and devalue everything machine produced to being trivial in cost.

(I think I stayed clear of political forces here? I didn't place judgement on any actors. I tried to just talk about power...)

 

[UngainlyTitan]

@NotAYakk I am afraid I completely disagree with you. Every one that exists in an economy contributes to that economy. They consume goods and services. The only ones that do not contribute are people that live completely off grid. Ones that grow their own food and make their clothes and houses from stuff they produce themselves.
The wealthy elite are people and there is only so much room for them. Reduce the number of people in the economy and there is less room at the top.
A widget factory in Indonesia, that is totally automated is no use unless there are people to buy the product.
The untimate underpinning of human government is legitimacy.
Louis the XVI could not clear the streets of Paris with a "whiff of grapeshot" because that was an order he could issue but could not be sure it would be obeyed. Also, it would not solve his underlying problem, the monarchy was bankrupt.
Napoleon could issue that order because he knew the order would be obeyed, that the people of France were sick of the instability and the tax problem had been solved years before by the revolution.

 

[Umbran]

So maybe we can transition to some other kind of value produced by people, and devalue everything machine produced to being trivial in cost.

Anyone here watch, The Orville? It is Seth McFarlane's Star Trek, and is awesome, and possibly the most... Trekky Trek since TNG. In it, Earth has become a largely utopian, post-scarcity society. And, a couple times they reference that, with the invention of matter synthesis and nigh-infinite energy supplies, the concept of normal money for goods produced ceased to make any sense.

But they also note that, "...human ambition didn't vanish. The only thing that changed is how we quantify wealth. People still want to be rich, but now being rich means being the best at what you do."

Oh, here's a clip of one discussion of it...

 

[cmad1977]

In other discussions over the years, I made the observation that there’s a lot of fiction that is set in semi-utopian societies- sometimes they’re even post-scarcity.

You never see fiction set in the transition from what we have now to the societies they posit.

Over the past 20 years, we’ve been seeing the rise of technology that would seem to point in the directions the futurists are predicting. In 2012, a robotics company unveiled a prototype modular manufacturing robot that could do 200 different tasks, for the same projected 5 year cost as an Indonesian factory worker.

We’re seeing bigger, longer tests of autonomous automobiles hit the road.

On the computing side, AI programs have gotten to be 60% as good at diagnosing illnesses as actual MDs, according to a couple of studies,

And those companies surely weren’t the only ones with projects like that in the works.

So my guess is we’re going to see the acceleration of technology eliminating the need to work in centralized locations AND outright eliminating jobs. IOW, I really think we’re at the dawn of that transitional period nobody ever talks about, and Covid-19 is the catalyst.

Just look at Amazon warehouses. Vastly more automated than 10 years ago.
My friend literally had a rover type robot deliver his order a couple months ago. He walked up to it, used his phone to unlock the box, took his order out and the robot rolled off to do its next task.
It was a cool video.
The worst part of all this isn’t the fact that automation is obviously the future for a wide variety of businesses. It’a that some people don’t want to think about the massive effect this has on society and refuse to plan for it.

 

[Umbran]

The worst part of all this isn’t the fact that automation is obviously the future for a wide variety of businesses. It’a that some people don’t want to think about the massive effect this has on society and refuse to plan for it.

Well, that's kind of assuming people understand the ramifications of change, and can plan for it effectively.

I am not at all sure that's a good assumption. Humans to date have not been remarkable in our ability to predict the effects of economic change in the long term.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Anyone here watch, The Orville? It is Seth McFarlane's Star Trek, and is awesome, and possibly the most... Trekky Trek since TNG. In it, Earth has become a largely utopian, post-scarcity society. And, a couple times they reference that, with the invention of matter synthesis and nigh-infinite energy supplies, the concept of normal money for goods produced ceased to make any sense.

But they also note that, "...human ambition didn't vanish. The only thing that changed is how we quantify wealth. People still want to be rich, but now being rich means being the best at what you do."

Oh, here's a clip of one discussion of it...

I pretty much agree on the underlying take. Take money as we understand it out of the equation in a post scarcity society and people will still divide on status markers. Though in my view it is as likely to be "be good as extemporising Haikus" and "being the best is some field"

 

[noko]

Depends on where you are. If your country’s safety net is relatively straightforward, a UBI system might be more trouble than it’s worth in the short run.

The system proposed for the USA, otoh, eliminated or reduced nearly every agency and program associated with our labyrinthine “welfare state”, including numerous investigative and judicial oversight branches. That prunes thousands of pages of legal code and regulations down to the minimum needed to determine everyone got the right sized check- fewer loopholes, fewer ways to chest, less need for investigation, enforcement and court cases. Even without raising taxes, reducing the beaurocracy by that much was calculated to result in a net increase in benefit to the recipients.

Of course, that UBI proposal had its own acknowledged flaws. By reducing EVERYTHING- SocSec, Medicare, Medicaid, WIC, etc. to a monthly check, you’re then depending on the recipients to make good decisions allocating that cash to necessities, not bread & circuses. If they don’t, you have a subset of citizens once again falling prey to the societal ills all those agencies were ostensibly created to combat.

Since we don’t live in an idealized world, a UBI program like the one proposed probably wouldn’t work. You’d still need some kind of institutional safety net, even if it’s skeletal in comparison to the current one. That + UBI = tax hike and/or other budget cuts.

I think you would end up with an enormous black market.

 

[Umbran]

Though in my view it is as likely to be "be good as extemporising Haikus" and "being the best is some field"

Extemporising haikus is a field. Do not discount arts. Some of our most revered (high-reputation) people today are artists, and there's no reason for that to stop in such a system.