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American Equity

blog.samaltman.com

31–40 of 552 posts

Re: American Equity

#31
I think this is the only model that makes sense in the end game where robots replace human labor.

Imagine we lived in a world where labor was unimportant because machines did most things better than humans could. These machines would still required time and natural resources (space, energy and matter) to produce goods and services.

For most people, "working" in this world would consist of going online, buying or trading an amount of energy, buying raw materials or spent matter that is ready to be recycled and pressing a "Start" button. Machines would produce some new goods or services.

Some people may also work on designing new better machines that produce finer goods. This would be mostly creative work as the technical part would mostly be automated. The machines could be specialized for maximum efficiency and quality.

People wouldn't have to go out to work. Machine owners could watch webcam feeds of their machines working in an industrial park somewhere. The finished goods, spent matter (trash) and the machines themselves, would be picked up and delivered by self driving delivery robots.

To get some variety, people would trade the production of different machines and they would trade excess spent matter. They would also trade the machine designs and the land or space to host the machines. The machines would sometimes have to be replaced when worn out or obsolete.

Now assume total energy production was constrained globally to a more or less fixed rate based on what could reasonably be captured from the sun. People would own shares in energy production capacity.

There could be a level of inequality in this society. This depends on how much governments would allow ownership of things to be concentrated, especially ownership of energy, useful space and natural resources.

A good way to prevent too high inequality would be for everyone to be shareholders in global production. Every day, shareholder would receive a dividend, an amount of energy/matter to be spent. They could use it in machines to produce stuff or services, trade it or maybe store it in a battery.

This is better than UBI because it aligns production incentives with consumption incentives and make the system naturally sustainable. If people vote for policies that are inefficient and reduce production, they will simply get a smaller dividend. I'm not making a value judgment either. What people collectively want might not always be a larger dividend. But at least the trade-off will be more explicit and sustainable.

Re: American Equity

#32
post #9

Meta question: if this essay about "American Equity" is another way of proposing "universal basic income" , why is there circumlocution around UBI? Possibilities are "UBI" has been poisoned with negative connotations can you can't talk about it anymore. That's possible but it seems like the overwhelming sentiment on HN and reddit is massive support for it. As far as I can tell, "UBI" doesn't have negative connotation…

For one thing, it allows the branding to focus around Altman’s specific idea instead of the wide variety of UBI ideas. I think it would make a program more defensible if it had a new name, so that the proponents of that program only have that program’s ideas to defend and not the giant flank of every UBI implementation ever proposed, all lumped together by a common name.

[deleted]

Re: American Equity

#33
post #20

People already have a share in the GDP. That's what it is, the total domestic product, the sum of all the little parts. The problem is not that people don't have share in it (and this goes for every country, not just for the USA), but that they have a disproportionate share in it. Bill Gates' (to name a random American citizen) has a far larger share in the GDP than most other Americans. If you want to solve that rai…

> Bill Gates' (to name a random American citizen) has a far larger share in the GDP than most other Americans. If you want to solve that raise your taxes on the rich and lift up those that are at the lowest end of the scale. That will have a lot more effect than some fiction where you get to do a bunch of make-believe bookkeeping. Or go a step further do what nobody has the balls to do: tax wealth That's what all the…

Without a doubt, a global wealth tax would significantly improve the quality of life for every human on this planet; even those with the large amounts of wealth being taxed.

Re: American Equity

#34
post #15

To turn a Nation-State into a "for-profit" for citizens will make US a weird version of Petro-State without Petroleum.

Look at Oklahoma if you want to see the US version of a petro state. If we're going to do the petro state thing anyways, might was well run an interesting social experiment instead of just enriching a few huge corporations while shuttering our schools.

Re: American Equity

#36
People need a variety of goods from society, like security, healthcare, education, a way to settle disputes via law as opposed to might; etc. American inequality is not just about money or shares. Racial segregation is enforced by the unique system of local taxes funding local schools an erecting barriers for poor people to both move in and access good education. This was intentionally and purposefully set up as a means of segregation - i.e. deny black people from entering white communities and access the same social goods.

One basic suggestion is to pool all public education dollars at a larger unit, and distribute across all schools in a given state equitably. Eventually all public schools in a given state will have similar quality, and more importantly, the upper middle classes will now put their considerable resources and energy to improving the whole state system instead of their idyllic town, lifting up the standards across the whole state.

Of course people will be upset about their property values - in fact, that's when you begin to see the true proportions of American social division: People have equity built up in segregation. They bought in to the system.

Many countries have roughly comparable public schools across groups of a couple million people. It is not tiny districts with massive disparities across one another.

Another idea is national health care - the US Government already pays for most of the actual costs: Veterans, active-duty military, Children in need, the poor, and the majority of elderly Americans. These constitute most of the actual costs. The government also pays indirectly through healthcare benefits provided to roughly 1/3rd of America employed via various levels of government (state, fed, local) and government-run entities (like subways, school etc.).

So - the gov pays for the sick people, whereas the healthy working age people pay into insurance. So the costs come out of gov, but the $ goes to private.

We also have massive inefficiency maintaining bureaucracies in hospitals, government, and insurance companies to do billing. Europeans are shocked at just how much of the healthcare $ is spent on this staff, that is more than half of all staff. You can fire every single person doing reimbursements and billing if you had a nationalized healthcare system. You can also remove perverse incentives to docs, who make money by treating you unnecessarily. When Doc has college bills to pay for little junior, you're GETTING that stent, need it or not.

Re: American Equity

#37

People already have a share in the GDP. That's what it is, the total domestic product, the sum of all the little parts. The problem is not that people don't have share in it (and this goes for every country, not just for the USA), but that they have a disproportionate share in it. Bill Gates' (to name a random American citizen) has a far larger share in the GDP than most other Americans. If you want to solve that rai…

>Bill Gates' (to name a random American citizen) has a far larger share in the GDP than most other Americans. If you want to solve that raise your taxes on the rich and lift up those that are at the lowest end of the scale.

I don't understand why this is something people believe needs "solved". Did you build Microsoft?

Re: American Equity

#38
post #20

People already have a share in the GDP. That's what it is, the total domestic product, the sum of all the little parts. The problem is not that people don't have share in it (and this goes for every country, not just for the USA), but that they have a disproportionate share in it. Bill Gates' (to name a random American citizen) has a far larger share in the GDP than most other Americans. If you want to solve that rai…

> Bill Gates' (to name a random American citizen) has a far larger share in the GDP than most other Americans. If you want to solve that raise your taxes on the rich and lift up those that are at the lowest end of the scale. That will have a lot more effect than some fiction where you get to do a bunch of make-believe bookkeeping. Or go a step further do what nobody has the balls to do: tax wealth That's what all the…

The estate tax is a tax on wealth.

Re: American Equity

#39

A better thing to do would be to campaign the SEC to remove the accredited investor regulation so that we can choose what we want to invest in, instead of forcing us all into this America bucket while the rich and connected get first pick on every opportunity. I'm tired of sitting back and seeing companies that I liked but couldn't invest in become > 500m market cap successes. If I spent 4 years at one of these compa…

That already happened, though, didn't it? JOBS Act III?

Re: American Equity

#40
post #33
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bill Gates' (to name a random American citizen) has a far larger share in the GDP than most other Americans. If you want to solve that raise your taxes on the rich and lift up those that are at the lowest end of the scale. That will have a lot more effect than some fiction where you get to do a bunch of make-believe bookkeeping. Or go a step further do what nobody has the balls to do: tax wealth That's what all the…

Without a doubt, a global wealth tax would significantly improve the quality of life for every human on this planet; even those with the large amounts of wealth being taxed.

I'd be fine with a wealth tax on a national level with restrictions on offshoring cash, but I don't want to steal wealth from everyone in the west to distribute it globally. You'd also have a very difficult time getting nations like China to agree to something like this.

Edit: sorry, wasn't aware of the exact definition of this. Having everyone pass this sort of thing is a great idea imo.

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