UBI and the Anti-Work Vibe Shift

The article revolves around the responses of Noah Smith but it is my opinion that Noah is not really a genuine actor. Noah to me just represents the system (as opposed to non-system [0]). His role is not to make radical conclusions but simply to provide a counter reactionary voice for the neo liberal order.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-system_opposition

We want to guarantee for every human on the planet the right to food, water, shelter, health care, and education. Giving everyone enough money to buy all those things themselves is one way to do it. Raising funds (taxes) and then providing those services for free is another way. It doesn’t really matter which way. What matters is that we agree on that goal and find some way to achieve it.

Right now we have a system where people must do a job, even a meaningless one, to get those things. People who are unable to do work or find work, through no fault of their own, are doomed to suffer in poverty. It’s cruel and inhumane, especially when there isn’t enough work to go around.

With our advanced technology we can sustain everyone’s lives with only a portion of the population actually doing labor. What portion, I don’t know. But we don’t expect children or the elderly to work. They are often unable, and we don’t need them to. Well, if there is a surplus in the labor supply, and there are capable adults who could work, but we don’t need them to, why put them through the indignity? Don’t force them to do a meaningless job and waste their lives. Don’t doom them to suffer and die. As long as the resources are available, let them live a decent life.

I think people are beginning to see work as a sucker's game. The assets you hold are much more important. You can bust your ass and get a nice little startup exit -- and then look around at what real estate this massive windfall will buy you, only to realize that it's all gone up in price by the same amount. It would have been better to have bought a house, kept the easy job, and gone home at 4:30 each day.

People see this. They see that wealth is handed out, arbitrarily, to the people who are connected to the issuance of currency and the banking system. That homeowners make more in a year from asset appreciation than well paid engineers do.

At one level, the answer is obvious -- just keep buying assets, any assets. Do not hold cash. The end.

And at one level that feels great. You look at your brokerage account and go "I have how much in unrealized gains?!" More than you make in many years working a pretty-good job.

But it's precisely this that causes the problem. When "dvalue/dt" >> "salary" for a long enough time, eventually it comes to feel that "salary" is just a bullshit term in the equation that you can neglect. A distraction for the schmucks who don't have their eye on the ball. Every hour I spend debugging something is an hour I haven't spent finding a deal on some asset.

This is the source of the vibe shift. There is a growing belief that, well, if money can be handed out arbitrarily in one fashion, then why can't it be handed out arbitrarily in another? This reflects a widespread collapse of belief that things are natural, inevitable, or just. It is a rational change to belief.

But it's a slow disease for the society as a whole. Because work is necessary, and we have real work to do. We complain here so much -- that there are not enough houses, not enough walkable cities, problems in healthcare and the environment, too much centralization and bloat in our own software industry. "Be the change you want to see in the world", right? These are things we need to work on, and we don't really have that much time; the decades pass quickly. We do have to work.

So, when so much work is necessary, it's a problem when the entire idea of work begins to seem pointless.

Maybe the other reason it seems so pointless is that the work we are paid to do so often does not push in the direction we would really like to be moving in. We're doing it for the money, the money-math increasingly makes it look pointless, and it does not have some other deep meaning for us, because what money wants isn't what we want.

When you take away the government's monopoly on power you get what subsequently happened in Russia, a handful of oligarchs who have all the power instead.

Exactly, the list of conditions to keep what is now your only available source of income happy will keep growing.

Hesitant about the latest gene therapy, no money for you.