71–80 of 296 posts
>> A basic floor of income that everyone gets, Surely the author has to know that providing UBI is just going to lead to inflation of rent, food, and transportation.
Bunch of research on this, and while it does lead to some inflation, so long as competition is acting on the market only a small percentage goes on this.
Universal income is a fancy name around what happened in Soviet Union with the key difference is that in the Soviet Union you were forced to work to collect it - you couldn’t not work. The whole “make work optional” part of the idea sounds like it adds a “fun” new twist on the outcome if “fun” means dystopia.
It is hilarious to me that all the AI CEOs are libertarians and right wingers that complain about welfare fraud and espouse Ayn Rand yet at the same time push for UBI which is essentially a form of communism.
The problem with paying everyone the same wage is that it disincentivizes personal growth and those that have invested in that growth don’t get rewarded. The problem with not investing in personal growth is you end up with a socially ill population in a death spiral. Russia still hasn’t recovered from the Communists and the imperialists before them. China has had to be quite violent and repressive to create stability.
We shouldn’t expect markets to solve all problems. That’s why there are public institutions and government regulations, to take care of the issues that the markets can’t. That the room only exists due to public grants isn’t a flaw, it’s what a functioning society should be doing. What the economy should do is provide the financing for such programs through taxes.
The author’s argument is that it is sort of flawed to fund it through a grant (top down decision making) rather than funding a UBI and allowing people to create third spaces as needed (emergent, bottom up decision making). I think he’s right that the former is liable to be missing a lot of local knowledge in the Hayekian sense, though I’m not sure a UBI would necessarily result in more third spaces per se.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's optimizing for something, but ultimately, markets can also be outcompeted by central planning in some sectors. I view the market more as playing the role of a modern God, something that "works in mysterious ways" and is "omnipresent, omnisapient, and benevolent". Not something we would dare to question, because it’s way too complicated for our little minds to understand. Instead we just need to believe in it.
That objection applies to the other options as well. Believe in... I like the market because it lets me make more choices of my own. I don't like zoning codes because too often they are placing restrictions that restrict freedom for some value that isn't objective.
That might be a literal case of Chesterton's fence.
Very good and well-written. I wish we would also acknowledge that the market, by disincentivizing spend on stuff like this, is performing well. It is optimizing. The reason it matters to acknowledge this up front is so that we can, as the article says, get to the rule below all this which is that the market is default. This is a clear and thorough example of how the profit motive does not lead to the life any of us w…
It is mostly written by llm. “narrower” and “I want to put a fence here” hedging, etc. This is very 4.8. Maybe llm that has been somewhat massaged by a human to sound less ai.
This strikes me as the good writing that LLMs very poorly try to model (or have been forced into through brutal fine-tuning), and I think we should be cautious not to miss the distinction.
I don't suppose you're someone who tends to dislike metaphorical flourish and narrative elements in articles even before all this? I ask, because I've been wondering lately whether people who like clear information-based writing might have a less developed pallete for writing styles, and "humans writing with flourish" might kinda blend with "LLMs writing"..?
Very good and well-written. I wish we would also acknowledge that the market, by disincentivizing spend on stuff like this, is performing well. It is optimizing. The reason it matters to acknowledge this up front is so that we can, as the article says, get to the rule below all this which is that the market is default. This is a clear and thorough example of how the profit motive does not lead to the life any of us w…
It's optimizing for something, but ultimately, markets can also be outcompeted by central planning in some sectors. I view the market more as playing the role of a modern God, something that "works in mysterious ways" and is "omnipresent, omnisapient, and benevolent". Not something we would dare to question, because it’s way too complicated for our little minds to understand. Instead we just need to believe in it.
>> A basic floor of income that everyone gets, Surely the author has to know that providing UBI is just going to lead to inflation of rent, food, and transportation.
It would still compress the distribution wouldn't it? Imagine UBI of $490k per day (I'm using silly numbers to prevent silly arguments) while poor people are previously earning $10k per day and rich people are earning $510k per day. That is rich people earning 51 times as much as poor people and (regardless of inflation) getting 51 times as much stuff. After the UBI the rich get only 2 times as much stuff as the poor…
>> A basic floor of income that everyone gets, Surely the author has to know that providing UBI is just going to lead to inflation of rent, food, and transportation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bunch of research on this, and while it does lead to some inflation, so long as competition is acting on the market only a small percentage goes on this.
I haven't heard of any UBI experiments, only giving BI to some people, which would not have much impact on things like average rents over an entire region.
(I appreciate that I'm not offering sources, and am going from memory here. Sorry, if I had the time I would try and track them down.)
Everything, literally everything is being turned into a hellscape by the ever increasing demands of financialization - driven especially by the unique American decision to base their entire pension system on the stock and asset markets. The sheer amount of money flowing into pension contributions needs some way to escape (i.e. to be invested), and that means that everything not "profitable" - like most third spaces a…
It seems like the problem is more that urban boomers/genx/millenials didn’t want more than one or two kids… which is the central thesis here, why does having four kids suck in cities. Which i think historically has always been true. So its just an unsolved problem across time and space.