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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

#71
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Invested money is efficiently and quickly converted into paychecks for ordinary people.

It absolutely is not. Can you elaborate?

If by investment you mean funding rounds, then yes I guess. However, they don't use a noticeable of their personal wealth for that purpose at all.

Happy to be proven wrong, though.

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

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI somehow does materially, permanently change the amount of human employment required, I don't think anyone is going to like the outcomes. I am to the left politically, but I do not think UBI can work in practice for the majority of population due to human nature and the resulting lack of purpose. People do seem to have an innate need for purpose, and most people need one imposed on them by circumstances, it woul…

Well,with the big asterisk that people were not allowed to meet eachother. That seems like a big limitation

Technically sure, in some places, for a limited period of time measured in weeks.. with many caveats.

In practice not really, and certainly not 6-18+ months after March 2020

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

#74
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren’t hoarding money, you don’t understand that? What “money” velocity would be higher? Some of these companies have very little profit compared to wealth.

I perfectly understand that they don't have a swimming pool of coins and bills. However, that doesn't make them less rich by any means. Being illiquid doesn't mean they can't use that wealth.

But "using wealth" precisely means spending money, doesn't it? That is to say, the opposite of hoarding?

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

#75
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…

Population is declining in many parts of the world while productivity is increasing. That doesn’t sound like a world of scarcity. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/business/china-population...

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

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI somehow does materially, permanently change the amount of human employment required, I don't think anyone is going to like the outcomes. I am to the left politically, but I do not think UBI can work in practice for the majority of population due to human nature and the resulting lack of purpose. People do seem to have an innate need for purpose, and most people need one imposed on them by circumstances, it woul…

Well,with the big asterisk that people were not allowed to meet eachother. That seems like a big limitation

Don't we have social media?

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

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well,with the big asterisk that people were not allowed to meet eachother. That seems like a big limitation

Technically sure, in some places, for a limited period of time measured in weeks.. with many caveats. In practice not really, and certainly not 6-18+ months after March 2020

I didn't meet essentially anybody beside my wife for almost 2 years, that was a lot (canada)

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

#78
post #68
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

Fertility is regulated by education, culture, and labor because it is driven by social interplay between sexes and available resources. Education, culture and resources are women's criteria for evaluating suitable men. UBI makes these criteria meaningless. Cloning and surrogacy removes the need for inter-sexual selection altogether. When you just have one guy cloning himself with government subsidy, there are totally…

> UBI makes these criteria meaningless.

No, it doesn’t. You’re just assuming this is the case because it destabilizes the hierarchy you’re implicitly attached to.

Notice the pattern: women’s preferences are just artificial constraints, meaning and agency are hand waved away, and what’s left is a simplistic model of mindless replicators constrained only by available resources. The dynamics of human society reduced to that of E. coli. This is not how reality works.

This sort of fixation on “reproductive greed” mirrors market fundamentalism. Human behavior is collapsed into a single maximization drive which is circularly declared a law of nature.

> We already see the effects of this in say, Africa where you have a massive population explosion caused by aid.

The Africa example is a perfect example of post-hoc rationalization. You take complex demographic dynamics and use them to selectively justify a prior belief of “free resources cause collapse” rather than letting the data inform your priors. In reality fertility is much better explained by declining infant mortality, low female education, and labor incentives.

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

#79
post #74
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I perfectly understand that they don't have a swimming pool of coins and bills. However, that doesn't make them less rich by any means. Being illiquid doesn't mean they can't use that wealth.

But "using wealth" precisely means spending money, doesn't it? That is to say, the opposite of hoarding?

Exactly. And guess what would happen if 1 million was divided between 100'000 people ? This would mean 10k per person and it's fair to say that at least half would spend (some of) it. Therefore, the velocity has increased.

A person having 200 billion is not spending a big percentage of their wealth nor using it. Yes it's not cash but it doesn't mean it's unusable.

I'm not against the ability to be rich; I'm against the ability to be that rich. The system isn't made to have such wealthy people. My country is one of the rare ones that has wealth tax and you just have to see where the progressive tax rate stops to see what I mean.

This would probably get me sent to an American prison.

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

#80
post #78
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fertility is regulated by education, culture, and labor because it is driven by social interplay between sexes and available resources. Education, culture and resources are women's criteria for evaluating suitable men. UBI makes these criteria meaningless. Cloning and surrogacy removes the need for inter-sexual selection altogether. When you just have one guy cloning himself with government subsidy, there are totally…

> UBI makes these criteria meaningless. No, it doesn’t. You’re just assuming this is the case because it destabilizes the hierarchy you’re implicitly attached to. Notice the pattern: women’s preferences are just artificial constraints, meaning and agency are hand waved away, and what’s left is a simplistic model of mindless replicators constrained only by available resources. The dynamics of human society reduced to…

Women's preferences aren't artificial constraints (I would stress that they are a fundamental regulating factor in human society), but in a UBI world they would be made artificial. In a world with cloning and surrogacy, they will become irrelevant constraints. If there are unlimited resources, there is no need to select for a suitable mate, so this skill will be unlearned.

Humans don't reproduce like e. coli, but in a UBI world that is the kind of human you are artificially selecting for. Ordinarily, bacteria aren't antibiotic-resistant, but exposure to antibiotics generation-over-generation changes them.

Show me the incentives, and I will show you the man they create. Like it or not, Humans are animals. We have the same primal motivations as other animals, just a more complex expression of those motivations. I think you focus on the details of that expression to lose the big picture, which is incongruent for your personal desires of being free from material constraints.

Life, like art, is defined by constraints. The meaning of our lives is to heroically struggle against them until we fail. To remove the constraints is to denature mankind. The process of evolution is nessisarially actuated through suffering. We naturally struggle against constraints like hunger, disease, and so on in an individual scale because this is what gives us meaning. But it would be a mistake to overcome these on a systematic scale, as it would rid of us of meaning. The future you propose is mankind wireheading itself.

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