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Big Tech’s View of Universal Basic Income Is Deeply Flawed

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Re: Big Tech’s View of Universal Basic Income Is Deeply Flawed

#51

Post by JamesBarney »

40acres wrote: post #33
bandrami wrote: post #9

This will be unpopular, but: what if an uncomfortably large part of the population just really doesn't have anything economically worthwhile to offer in the modern context? Nobody wants to say that, but if it's true, then something like a UBI or dole (even granting the author's problems with it) is all we can do short of mounting a massive Plato's Cave-like conspiracy to convince people they are doing something usefu…

Interesting thought, I'd wager that our economy isn't as efficient as it should be with respect to the labor force. For instance there are tons of men in their prime age working years who are dropping out of the labor force, and the teen employment rate is low compare to previous years. You also have older Americans who may be physically unable to do manual work but could be hired in a sort of a human + software augm…

Those content monitor jobs sound pretty terrible.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/04/facebook-...

Re: Big Tech’s View of Universal Basic Income Is Deeply Flawed

#52

Post by adamnemecek »

greglindahl wrote: post #48
adamnemecek wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone still has to do the jobs. The sanitation workers, the McDonalds employees, the truck drivers, the waiters, the cooks Those jobs are going away.

Cooking has become vastly more efficient over the past 10,000 years, especially recently with labor-saving kitchen equipment. Yet there are still cooks. And we eat fancier food.

They will be replaced by machines very soon. I'm pumped for when cooking becomes essentially programming.

Cooking is a sequence of steps, just like programming.

Re: Big Tech’s View of Universal Basic Income Is Deeply Flawed

#53

Post by eeZah7Ux »

zqfm wrote: post #15
bandrami wrote: post #9

This will be unpopular, but: what if an uncomfortably large part of the population just really doesn't have anything economically worthwhile to offer in the modern context? Nobody wants to say that, but if it's true, then something like a UBI or dole (even granting the author's problems with it) is all we can do short of mounting a massive Plato's Cave-like conspiracy to convince people they are doing something usefu…

> mounting a massive Plato's Cave-like conspiracy to convince people they are doing something useful Maybe I'm missing something but I feel like that's what most of us are doing now anyway.

Spot on.

Apart from so-called "bullshit jobs" that are spreading in the richest countries, how much work is mostly unnecessary, easy to avoid or to automate away?

With "unnecessary" I mean that don't add much to the human experience.

Re: Big Tech’s View of Universal Basic Income Is Deeply Flawed

#54

Post by [deleted] »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #27
bandrami wrote: post #9

This will be unpopular, but: what if an uncomfortably large part of the population just really doesn't have anything economically worthwhile to offer in the modern context? Nobody wants to say that, but if it's true, then something like a UBI or dole (even granting the author's problems with it) is all we can do short of mounting a massive Plato's Cave-like conspiracy to convince people they are doing something usefu…

We also have the problem that people are forced to evaluate what activities would be productive for them in terms of the money paid to them, but it's debatable whether the aggregated signals of demand in a given economy truly reflect what people would believe are "important" or "needed" or "valuable" activities (using scare quotes specifically because obviously the whole debate revolves around how to determine the me…

[deleted]

Re: Big Tech’s View of Universal Basic Income Is Deeply Flawed

#55

Post by lewis500 »

aeleos wrote: post #26

What I don’t get about articles like this is how they just go on and on about how bad of an idea UBI is but don’t propose any kind of a solution. It’s not like UBI was created just to have fun, there are legitimate problems facing our society and our current trajectory is that the problems are getting worse. Maybe I am just missing some part of the article but what’s the point of saying something is bad without even…

Yeah all I see here is incoherent posturing.

"Most of them [the people living on RSA] indeed live out of poverty, but they are no incentivized whatsoever to get any extra training or even to find a job." This is a plain lie and, besides, has nothing to do with UBI. Regarding, the RSA, it diminishes more slowly than labor earnings (as you can see simply by reading the chart on its short Wikipedia page), so the more money you earn, the more money you get to spend. So there is an incentive to get training and a job. But in any case it has nothing to do with UBI proposals: the UBI idea is that your benefit wouldn't diminish at all as you earn more money, so the incentive to get a job and earn more is even stronger under UBI than under RSA. I think the reason this guy is surrounded by unemployed people living off RSA is that he lives next to defunct villages with high unemployment; these people can't get jobs because they aren't available. Thank god for the benefits then.

"I doubt they ever drove a couple of days in the backcountry." Blah blah some ad hominem about tech people being elite nerds that doesn't relate to the efficacy of UBI. I love the implicit claim that this dude gets it because he spends time at his summer home in the rough and tumble "backcountry" of the Loire Valley.

"To do so, it must take the long view and start to care about its stakeholders and not only about its shareholders. " Blah blah some word salad that doesn't mean anything specific about policy.

Re: Big Tech’s View of Universal Basic Income Is Deeply Flawed

#56

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

I have a working theory that the fundamental differences between conservatives and liberals include the following:

(1) While both groups would like an accurate understanding of human nature, conservatives tend to be pessimistic and liberals tend to be optimistic.

(2) While both groups would like to be compassionate and charitable, they're riled by different problems: Conservatives especially hate the idea of freeloading / abuse of charity, but liberals especially hate the idea of anyone not receiving the charity.

It sounds like Filloux would consider himself a conservative, and the VCs liberals, according to my theory.

Re: Big Tech’s View of Universal Basic Income Is Deeply Flawed

#57

Post by repolfx »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #27
bandrami wrote: post #9

This will be unpopular, but: what if an uncomfortably large part of the population just really doesn't have anything economically worthwhile to offer in the modern context? Nobody wants to say that, but if it's true, then something like a UBI or dole (even granting the author's problems with it) is all we can do short of mounting a massive Plato's Cave-like conspiracy to convince people they are doing something usefu…

We also have the problem that people are forced to evaluate what activities would be productive for them in terms of the money paid to them, but it's debatable whether the aggregated signals of demand in a given economy truly reflect what people would believe are "important" or "needed" or "valuable" activities (using scare quotes specifically because obviously the whole debate revolves around how to determine the me…

Maybe your mom would, I'm sure she's a lovely woman.

But I know from hard experience that a lot of people wouldn't. My ex lost her job at some point and was looking for a year for a new one. She became terribly depressed, just staying in bed and crying all day. I'd talk her out of it, she'd be OK for a while, and then get depressed again because she felt "useless" and "like a loser".

I encouraged her, again and again, to go out and get a basic job even if it was menial, like waiting tables, or to volunteer for something, or to learn new skills, so at least she'd have something to do. But she refused to even look for jobs that weren't fancy middle class office jobs, volunteering was out of the question and her attempts at learning new skills were half-hearted at best.

Jobs aren't just a source of money. They're a source of validation, every day. Take away the job and people don't magically become perfect citizens who spend all their time doing generic good. They can become lethargic and depressed. As, in fact, the article articulates w.r.t. the French system.

Re: Big Tech’s View of Universal Basic Income Is Deeply Flawed

#58

Post by bena »

aeleos wrote: post #26

What I don’t get about articles like this is how they just go on and on about how bad of an idea UBI is but don’t propose any kind of a solution. It’s not like UBI was created just to have fun, there are legitimate problems facing our society and our current trajectory is that the problems are getting worse. Maybe I am just missing some part of the article but what’s the point of saying something is bad without even…

> What I don’t get about articles like this is how they just go on and on about how bad of an idea UBI is but don’t propose any kind of a solution.

You're falling for the politician's fallacy. You see a problem, you see a proposed solution, and not hearing any other solutions, you've determined that this solution will fix the problem.

Recognizing that a solution is bad is worthwhile in and of itself. If he's right and we accept that UBI is the wrong solution to the problem then we can stop funneling time and effort into trying to implement that solution and instead look for a solution that may work. Just because he doesn't have that solution doesn't mean we shouldn't listen to his reasons why UBI won't work.

It's like if two non-mechanics were trying to fix an engine and one proposes to slap the engine with his dick until it works again. Just because the other guy doesn't know how to fix the problem doesn't mean he's wrong when he says that slapping the engine with a dick isn't going to fix the problem.

Re: Big Tech’s View of Universal Basic Income Is Deeply Flawed

#59

Post by repolfx »

shafte wrote: post #20

The author makes a false equivalence between the RSA in France and the typical UBI proposal. An individual's RSA benefit decreases as their work income increases. This has the effect of making an individual weakly indifferent to working, since it will provide no marginal increase in income. Most UBI proposals involve a benefit that doesn't phase out with income (or phases out at an income level so high that it doesn'…

No, I think it's a reasonable comparison. Yes, phasing out benefits creates an incentive not to work.

But even many UBI proposals have some phase out, if only because the taxpayer paying money to a millionaire feels fundamentally wrong on so many levels.

And the bigger problem is more basic. The idea of UBI is that freed from the need to work, people will form utopian societies full of volunteering and self improvement and art projects etc. But France and realistically most welfare systems show that isn't true. People don't engage in self-improvement en-masse. They sit around watching TV or scrolling through Instagram all day, feeling useless and depressed.

Re: Big Tech’s View of Universal Basic Income Is Deeply Flawed

#60

Post by repolfx »

bena wrote: post #58
aeleos wrote: post #26

What I don’t get about articles like this is how they just go on and on about how bad of an idea UBI is but don’t propose any kind of a solution. It’s not like UBI was created just to have fun, there are legitimate problems facing our society and our current trajectory is that the problems are getting worse. Maybe I am just missing some part of the article but what’s the point of saying something is bad without even…

> What I don’t get about articles like this is how they just go on and on about how bad of an idea UBI is but don’t propose any kind of a solution. You're falling for the politician's fallacy. You see a problem, you see a proposed solution, and not hearing any other solutions, you've determined that this solution will fix the problem. Recognizing that a solution is bad is worthwhile in and of itself. If he's right an…

The fallacy runs even deeper than that. There might be no solution at all, by the construction of the problem.

The correct response to "this will not solve the problem you want to solve" is not "ok so you give me a better solution then", unless the problem is so existential that even doing something horribly wrong is still better than doing nothing.

The correct response may well be, "this will not work, therefore we should do nothing".

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