The Future of Not Working

In any case, the basic income is big enough to give people a lot more freedom and security than they had before. It's empowering.

Young people and whole villages can use it to bootstrap: things like proper cell service, internet, and healthy food become affordable where before they were not.

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GiveDirectly is my charity of choice right now. I have a $1000 monthly recurring with them.

The difference in cost of living between San Francisco and rural Kenya is vast. The upshot is that an amount that many of us here on HN can handle is life changing for a lot of people on the other end.

I live in a co-op, so I save more than that every month compared to many of my friends in rent alone, and still we all have ridiculously comfortable lives.

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Poverty exists here too, but a lot of it's entrenched and intractable. It has complex causes like bad urban design, bad schools, and political gridlock. It's hard to create improvement with a donation. It requires creative activism.

Rural Kenya and Uganda, on the other hand, have lots of communities full of bright young people where the main thing holding them back really is just an abject lack of resources.

That means there's an opportunity, and I think GiveDirectly is the best organization right now to take it.

- They are effective. They don't do virtue signaling. They don't helicopter in, build a cinderblock schoolhouse, and then pose for photos with smiling kids. They measure outcomes.

- They are efficient. They stick to cash transfers, the most direct way of giving. They track and advertise the fraction of their income that they lose to corruption and overhead. Most charities are worse on those metrics and don't talk about them.

- They are rational. They don't do sob stories. They don't spam. They are run like a startup, by economists.

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Be an activist locally. Be a donor globally. Many of us are extremely lucky and, by global standards, powerful. Wield it well :)

Whitewashing his reputation for posterity by spending money that has never been rightfully his.

How do you define simplistic terms? If you were hungry and someone gave you enough money to eat, that would be a solution regardless of how corrupt your government.

I don't know where you live but I'm in the U.S. where it's obvious the number of jobs is going to decline relative to the number of people who need them. Resources won't necessarily decline along with the jobs so I see this as not just applicable to the developing world and not just to solve poverty but to act as a stabilizing force.

On what do you base your claim this is a dumb attempt to guilt people? You're suggestion that's the motivation of those who are backing and implementing this test?

I don't really understand the idea that no action should be taken unless these conditions are met and these conditions are always outside the reach of those who want to act so they shouldn't act because conditions aren't perfect?

I don't think anyone's claiming that testing UI's objective is to see if it will lead to a utopia, otherwise it's a no-go. No, we can't fix poverty if you define fix as a perfect solution that works always and everywhere but if perfect conditions had to be met before anyone acted nobody would do anything productive or useful.

I guess I find your line of argument strange because it does not appear to be founded on anything at all that's coherent, though I'm hoping you can alleviate that problem by explaining it coherently.

I remember that back in 1990 or so, here in Estonia, which was becoming independent from Soviet Union, my parents (a doctor and a historian) made about $20 per month in Western currency. That bought yo plenty of food and local produce, or anything locally made. Something imported was still just as much as it was in Western countries. Today the average monthly salary is about $1200.

Great comments. I understand your comments on money, but I suspect other modern economies will fair the weather much better than the US. The US wealthy have diversified their wealth in physical assets, gold, foreign currencies, etc; things that have intrinsic value outside of the US. Not only that, they can continue to manufacture in foreign lands and sell to foreign markets. Capital is mobile, labor is not. What they almost certainly won't do is voluntarily give their wealth, without a fight, to combat mass unemployment. They will lobby hard against it (my original thought) or just leave the country.

The Great Depression saw a peak unemployment at around 25%. That took 10+ years, some arguably unconstitutional laws and a massive, global war effort (with destruction of many competing economies) to get out of. That was in a time period when both the political parties actually wanted to solve the problem. In the worst case scenario, with near complete automation and offshore labor, you'll be looking at around 75-90% unemployment in the US in a fairly rapid time period (10-20 years?). We've never seen anything like it; not that quickly.

I'd like to think we would figure out how to adapt, but we've had a serious political discussion about climate change for going on 10 years now, and the US has barely come around to agreeing it exists and is man caused (and I'm being generous) let alone an actionable plan to retard it, let alone reverse it. This denial and inaction is caused by the very same forces that will cause inertia when figuring out how to combat a US economy that can't support a fraction of the workforce.

We recently had the worst financial crisis since the great depression. Who got bailed out and who didn't? I understand why we needed to bail out the banks, but about the only thing the average homeowner got was weak refinancing laws that were abused by the wealthy banks! Furthermore, we haven't taken any serious measures to prevent it from happening again. What measures we did manage to take (Dodd-Frank) are constantly being picked away by those same forces.

We've had middle class wage stagnation for going on 30 years now and the electorate keeps voting for people who do things to perpetuate and accelerate that stagnation (both parties), thanks in part to misinformation and secrecy funded by those same forces.

As far as political shakeups, Occupy Wall Street did nothing. The Tea Party was absorbed then gradually extinguished by the GOP. The most recent political shakeup the US electorate could come up with was electing Trump. I don't have high hopes about him solving our upcoming economic problems either.

What we've been through in the last 10 or so years isn't even the scary part if my dire prediction comes to fruition. I don't think our political system is healthy enough to deal with what might be coming.

PS: This was a lot longer winded than I anticipated, so apologies if it reads all over the place.