The Great American Share – Sam Altman Interview on Basic Income

Who is this "we"? When I translate what you say into plain English, what I get is: One in twenty people will grow food and be forced to give it to everyone else, whether they want to or not. I agree that is an outdated ideology, yes. But the fact that food needs to be produced somehow is not.

> we can't find jobs for everyone

Again, who is "we"? Whose job is it to find jobs for everyone? Why is that necessary?

> Automation will make it worse

Automation can make things cheaper and cheaper; that's why it has continued to increase. That's making things better, not worse.

What makes things worse is pretending that products and services, whether produced by automation or any other means, will magically get distributed to where they are needed, or that "we" will magically decide correctly how that is to be done. That is indeed an outdated ideology, but unfortunately many people have not yet gotten the memo.

What will make things better is admitting that products and services have to be produced, and then traded for other products and services, in order for people to get the things they need. So the more efficient that process is, the less effort it will take for people to get the things they need, and therefore the easier it will be for them to do so.

Sort of. Each individual debt obligation has to be repaid as it comes due, but that's different from saying that total volume of debt ever needs to be paid down. The government can be meeting its debt obligations while at the same time increasing the total amount of debt. As long as there's a market for government debt, they can continue to roll over their debt.

They have to pay interest too, but this isn't exactly a problem. They can always borrow to pay the interest. And if treasury yields get too high, the Fed can buy up excess government debt. Then one part of the government is just paying interest to another part of the government anyway.

> This puts some constraint on the government. Whereas if the government creates the money, there is no constraint - it can spend as much money as it wants.

The borrowing is creating money. You can deficit spend without the bookkeeping of issuing treasury securities etc., but the result is the similar. The ultimate constraint is still the amount of spending that the economy can productively absorb.

> If you don't see why that might be a problem, let me ask you: Have you looked at Congress lately?

Sure. If Congress doesn't understand how deficits work and you can trick them into creating money without explicitly borrowing (even though you're technically still borrowing), then great. But that's politics, not economics.

> But for a fair amount of it, no, it is not invested in creating things of value to society, and so no, society does not get a return from it.

Correct. If the government spends money in a way that burns resources, it takes those resources away from the productive economy. But if the government spends money in a way that doesn't help, but doesn't hurt either, they can spend unlimited amounts of it without really changing the constraints on how much additional money they can spend. For example, if they printed money and spent it by tossing it down a hole, they could do it for as long as they wanted without hurting anyone, but without helping anyone either.

> And that means that it's a drain on society - the people who are in the service, or creating weapons, could be doing something else of more value to society - teaching children, or repairing roads and bridges, or building a better air traffic control system.

Yup. If labor is scarce and you're making people work on things that are not benefiting society, then you're taking a valuable resource (labor) away from the productive economy. I don't think we're particularly short on labor right now, but the same type of reasoning applies to any resource.

> So if Congress can create money, it can divert as much of the actual productive ability of the economy - people and materials - to whatever Congress thinks will get more votes. Again, I say, look at Congress. Do you really want to give them the ability to steer unlimited amounts of the economy to do whatever they think should be done? I don't. It's a horrible idea.

They already have that ability. I want them to use it to provide a basic income. Maybe that means making basic income more popular so it becomes one of the things that gets them votes.

Right now it's only fundamental to the minority of HNers who can't stop talking about it.

> If one's idea of human society is people working to earn money. Fullstop.

We don't work for money, we work for value, I do my part and in return, I'll get food shelter, protection by the police, roads etc.

> This seems to be a pretty impoverished view of humanity.

Requiring people to do their part for the group as a whole is an impoverished view of humanity?

> Then words like lazy

Yes, that is what you call a person who refuses to work, yet probably expects the fruit of other people's labour and yes, that's UBI in a nutshell.

> But one that our current capitalist system necessitates,

And by capitalist you mean all systems that we have tried so far.

> The other way is thinking of the billions of brains wasted every generation just trying to survive, exactly what humans did 2000 years ago.

Survival is just as important to us now as it was 2000 years ago, you are also overlooking the fact that we are getting better and better at it.

> Now imagine if all these brains could be freed and god knows how much innovation, progress and intellectual output can be unlocked into a completely different kind of society. That's a vision.

It's not a vision, it's just ignorance about the huge progress that we made as a species.

> But the reality is many will stick doggedly to the personal wealth and achievement mantra and because of the disproportionate influence of wealth and entrenched interests in our societies right from feudalism to now, and UBI or any such fanciful idea will be sabotaged and blocked.

The reality is: we want stuff. The more value we provide to society, the more stuff we get in return. For you to be able to give me free stuff means that somebody was happy to produce that stuff without getting anything in return, I believe the term for that is slavery.