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Why the Tech World Thinks the American Dream Is Dying

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Re: Why the Tech World Thinks the American Dream Is Dying

#41

I’m really curious how UBI would interact with the base emotional responses that drove a lot of our politics. The anti-freeloader impulse is one of the easiest ways to spur people to action. Would that go away or be intensified under UBI? would people cease to be charitable after a tragedy because they expect UBI to handle it?

I think it is a moot question because UBI and automation will destroy society as we know it through uncontrolled, malthusian growth. I don't think we will last long enough to see what long-term culture that results in.

With infinite welfare, the dominant culture will be the one that is able to reproduce as much as possible, perhaps through cloning? We are already seeing IVF, surrogate mothers and other sorts of cloning/eugenics sexual strategies emerge, just not on a dominant level yet.

If it wasn't for cloning, I would say it would look more like Calhoun's rat utopia due to sex-based competition.

>The anti-freeloader impulse is one of the easiest ways to spur people to action.

I would say this depends on culture. Only industrious countries tend to have culture with this impulse.

Re: Why the Tech World Thinks the American Dream Is Dying

#42
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how are the means of production going to be taken? They have direct control of all of the robots.

Until Congress passes a law nationalizing their company, and forces them to sell their company to a holding company owned by the government.

The government won't be able to force Robot Inc. to do anything. Robot Inc. has control of the robots, and the government has control over words on paper.

Re: Why the Tech World Thinks the American Dream Is Dying

#44
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are billionaires “hoarders”? They may be a lot of things, but to use hoarders is a gross misunderstanding of wealth, billionaires, how equities work and more. Bezos does not have a castle filled with a scrooge mcduck moneypool. There are not castles filled with grain that could otherwise be used to feed the starving peasants.

Velocity would be much higher if the same amount of money was in the hands of millions more people. Corruption of politics would be much harder, too.

That money is already in the hands of "millions more people". Invested money is efficiently and quickly converted into paychecks for ordinary people. That is the means by which investors hope to make a return on their investment.

Re: Why the Tech World Thinks the American Dream Is Dying

#45

If AI automates most jobs and UBI becomes the primary source of income for most people, doesn't that imply the means of production eventually have to transfer to government control? Is there a different mechanism that makes this work without that transfer?

Where’s the money for UBI going to come from when billionaires are hoarders and don’t like paying tax?

I guess the Tech Bro vision is that there just flat out won't be any interaction with money for the lower-classes anymore, because everything they need for living would be "free" (as in, provided by a set of perpetual "subscriptions" that don't require any direct compensation, but that tech companies can modify or even cancel at any point at their sole discretion)

Re: Why the Tech World Thinks the American Dream Is Dying

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are billionaires “hoarders”? They may be a lot of things, but to use hoarders is a gross misunderstanding of wealth, billionaires, how equities work and more. Bezos does not have a castle filled with a scrooge mcduck moneypool. There are not castles filled with grain that could otherwise be used to feed the starving peasants.

Don't most of them have prepper level bunkers on large parcels of property, a private jet flight away in case things go truly south?

Yeah but compared to the value they have in equities that are active companies, employing people, and generating value, these underground bunkers are small.

If you have money you generally don't want it to sit around and depreciate instead of investing into real-estate, private equity, etc. directly or indirectly.

Re: Why the Tech World Thinks the American Dream Is Dying

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where’s the money for UBI going to come from when billionaires are hoarders and don’t like paying tax?

How are billionaires “hoarders”? They may be a lot of things, but to use hoarders is a gross misunderstanding of wealth, billionaires, how equities work and more. Bezos does not have a castle filled with a scrooge mcduck moneypool. There are not castles filled with grain that could otherwise be used to feed the starving peasants.

Exactly. A whole lot of people have been sold this idea that "taxing billionaires" is going to solve all their problems and provide endless spending for all the free things they want, but this is simply not the case. First off, the math, even the naive math that assumes that all billionaires' stock can be instantly liquidated at the current prices does not work. As individuals these people do have quite a lot, but there are not enough of them. The politicians constantly mention the same 5-6 individuals with net work measured in the hundreds of of billions, then list the number of billionaires, but the vast majority of these "billionaires" are single digit billionaires, with their net work held in an extremely illiquid investment such as private companies.

If you actually introduced your wet dream billionaire wealth tax that's going to pay for everything forever, all these people would be forced to go to the market at the same time and sell their assets while every other billionaire is also going to be in the same position at the same time, so who are they selling to? The market would crash (also incidentally impacting all your middle class retirement plans) destroying billions upon billions of dollars in wealth. But OK, let's say you get this money now, let's pretend you could get enough, and the government starts spending it on entitlement programs--what you have just done is convert investment into consumption. What do you expect to happen in this case? I'd expect surging inflation.

Society effectively consumes everything that we produce. If we want to consume more, we need to produce more. The government can put their finger on the scale as to what is produced and who consumes it, the government can put policies in place that lead to additional production via removing obstacles from productive activities, introducing obstacles to unproductive activities, making investments or subsidies, etc. but all of this is more complicated and messy, it needs to be done intelligently and carries risk of distorting market realities leading to unintended consequences. This is called "governing" and it's what politicians are supposed to be doing. Outsiders who want power but can't effectively govern are always trying to sell people on these "one weird trick" narratives of easy fixes to hard problems.

Bezos has, I believe, two jets and three yachts along with a number a large homes with large household staff. A lot for a person to be sure, but most of his wealth is unrealized investment in a company that delivers goods to hundreds of millions of people's homes and powers countless tech companies that are used by billions of people. Taking his boats and planes away is just not going to move the needle, it's not going to make groceries cheaper or reduce the price of college tuition or add housing stock (aside from a handful of luxury homes in a couple of neighborhoods around the wold) or add any new doctors to the medical field. Certainly taxes can be increased, but no one should expect this to make a real dent in the budget. We got into this situation by decades of taking the easy route, so of course people are looking for easy solutions.

This is the exact same kind of magical thinking that the right uses to convince people that their life would be oh so much better if they just kicked out all the immigrants. There is no magic bullet, most spending by the government is on the middle class, most consumption is by the middle class (this is even more dramatic if you measure this in real world physical goods terms rather than including "luxury" markup on spending by the upper middle class). This is a huge group, hundreds of millions, that collectively consumes an unfathomable amount of resources, and moving some numbers around on a few computers in downtown Manhattan is not going to change this.

Re: Why the Tech World Thinks the American Dream Is Dying

#48

I’m really curious how UBI would interact with the base emotional responses that drove a lot of our politics. The anti-freeloader impulse is one of the easiest ways to spur people to action. Would that go away or be intensified under UBI? would people cease to be charitable after a tragedy because they expect UBI to handle it?

Monkey status games don't disappear just because everyone gets free money and no one has a job. They just take a different and more destructive form.

One of the benefits of status being associated with making money is that it tends to drive positive-sum productive behavior rather than zero-sum destructive behavior.

Re: Why the Tech World Thinks the American Dream Is Dying

#49

I’m really curious how UBI would interact with the base emotional responses that drove a lot of our politics. The anti-freeloader impulse is one of the easiest ways to spur people to action. Would that go away or be intensified under UBI? would people cease to be charitable after a tragedy because they expect UBI to handle it?

Right the problem with UBI is the people being productive in some way to fund it will always see the level of benefits as too much and those on the receiving end will see the benefits as too little. So as a higher % of people are on the receiving end, it creates a spiral of unfundable benefits demands.

Look at France, it seems like the biggest protests now are when it is suggested their retirement program is unsustainable and they should phase in a higher retirement age. And these programs across the west are becoming unsustainable because retirement ages were set decades ago at levels 0-10 years below life expectancy, and that gap has now grown to 20 years with a lower employed:retired ratio.

Re: Why the Tech World Thinks the American Dream Is Dying

#50
post #41

I’m really curious how UBI would interact with the base emotional responses that drove a lot of our politics. The anti-freeloader impulse is one of the easiest ways to spur people to action. Would that go away or be intensified under UBI? would people cease to be charitable after a tragedy because they expect UBI to handle it?

I think it is a moot question because UBI and automation will destroy society as we know it through uncontrolled, malthusian growth. I don't think we will last long enough to see what long-term culture that results in. With infinite welfare, the dominant culture will be the one that is able to reproduce as much as possible, perhaps through cloning? We are already seeing IVF, surrogate mothers and other sorts of cloni…

People aren’t rats. Overall fertility is strongly regulated by education level, labor opportunities, cultural norms, etc.

If “infinite welfare” unavoidably led to a reproductive feedback loop, the richest, safest societies would already be there, which we don’t see.

Your comment seems to rest on the unstated assumption that hierarchy between humans is an essential stabilizing force, and that abundance without it is unsustainable. I don’t think that’s an empirically settled conclusion.

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