I think whether the economies of scale and profit incentives get fucked up depends on the size of the before and after markets we are talking about.
For these to collapse, I believe we would need the international market for US oil specifically to be substantially larger than the entire domestic market for any oil. Is that true?
Do your kids randomly run into the road? I was worried about that but then mine just don’t run into the road for some reason, they are quite careful about it seemingly by default after having “getting bumped into by a car” explained to them. I’m not sure if this is something people are just paranoid about because the consequences are so bad or if some kids really do just run out into the road randomly.
Some kids really do just run into the road seemingly randomly. Other kids run in with a clear purpose, not at all randomly, and sometimes (perhaps very rarely, but it only takes once and bad luck) forget to look both ways. Kids are not cookie cutter copies that all behave the same way in the same circumstances (even with the same training).
I'm more worried about the Teslas hitting my kids when they're on bicycles or Teslas swerving off the road into the yards. Regardless, it sure would be nice if technology controlling multi-ton vehicles on public roads were subject to regulations, or at least had clearly define liability.
Kids will randomly run into the road. They might run behind a ball or a dog so that it doesn’t end up on the other side or runned over or are simply too excited to remember your stern road safety talk.
The first thing I was taught when I picked up a car was: if you see a ball on the road you stop immediately. This valuable lesson has saved one kid (and my sanity) with me on the wheel.
Yes it does happen. Otherwise smart kids will do dumb stuff sometimes. Like see their friend across the road, but at that moment someone on a motorcycle is accelerating out of their driveway, kid runs across, dead
How do we ensure that we don’t enter the failure mode of “not enough necessities get made”?
Like it seems like people are ideologically for or against UBI, but I’ve never seen anyone discuss how the mechanism would avoid this outcome. Like I’m not saying it’s 100% the outcome that would happen on whatever time frame, just that even e.g. a 10% chance of that happening would make it too risky to attempt at scale. And like I don’t accept “some people just love farming” or “a lot of stuff that isn’t needed gets made now”, I need an actual mechanism description.
> How do we ensure that we don’t enter the failure mode of “not enough necessities get made”?
Pay higher when someone does things. UBI + income. If you want to live better, try doing something that will bring you money, but if you fail, you can still live and try something other next time.
Current model: if you try something and fail, you are homeless and starving.
I could maybe support UBI if you completely shut down Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, school lunches, subsidized housing, and every other assistance program. It must replace all of that to achieve the so-called operational efficiency of just giving people cash. Give them enough to buy those things on the open market, and if they choose to spend it on something else, that's on them.
If you don't trust people enough to do that, then you don't trust them enough to do UBI.
I think most proponents of UBI want this and I think it's a good idea. UBI is meant as social security, just not dependent on what you do and doesn't disappear when you have cash. Just give minimum wage to everyone and remove minimum payment requirement from economy. If you use up your social security/UBI in wrong way, that's on you. But there should be probably some education. And if someone can't effectively use your allowance (mentally ill, non-functioning alcoholic), then maybe we should put such people in proper institutions, but they could be funded by UBI instead of specialised assistance program.
Failing -> homeless and starving is a failure mode at the level of the individual. That’s not good, but failure modes of the entire structure are higher priority and the two don’t really compare apples to apples. Capitalism (absent corruption) is actually sort of cleverly recursive there because financial destitution by definition cannot affect producers of vital goods, because the act of producing vital goods is precisely what is rewarded by the system. So at least what you mentioned cannot result in systemic failure from a mechanistic point of view, only an individual level failure (which isn’t to say that the individual is “to blame”, I am not talking moralistically, just that it affects individuals and not the entire structure).
On first paragraph, okay how does that scale though. Who does the actual work of producing things people need to live, and how do we make sure that enough people keep doing that specifically, even across plausible variable configurations such as “birth rate increases because people have more free time which means now you need more farming” etc.
We need to characterize these dynamics, wouldn’t you say? Have you thought about it, or are you satisfied by hand waving?
"Absent corruption" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your statement. The idea that the system can't fail raises the question what do you consider failure, and what do you consider corruption"
If prices increase and wages don't keep up with them, an increasing number of people become squeezed by their environment. This is a slow event, sure, but enough drops can fill a bucket. The fallout from this pressure on the general populace will be the failure that you're saying can't happen. This seems inevitable without an intervening event to reset things.
With that said, I don't think your concerns are unreasonable, and I'm not sure UBI by itself could solve anything. At a minimum price controls or government administering of food and housing would be necessary to keep prices from rising in response to the influx of cash everyone would receive, but the problem of people not working does seem like a big potential issue.
I believe there have been studies to the contrary, but those studies necessarily miss the universal part of ubi, so they don't have the negative feedback loops that could spring up in a real implementation.
I don't think the "producers" argument is true, and even so it really does depend on the profession and on current trends.
What was vital yesterday may be obsolete tomorrow (see hospital secretaries vs ambient scribes for instance). I assume when you think of people taking a potentially "destitution-risky" decision, you think "entrepreneur without savings or backup income", not "hospital secretary". Yet here we are.
Also, in many professions, "production" is multi-level. Who is the producer in a hospital, the nurse, or the hospital manager? Yet I can assure you nurses, as vital as they are, get fixed term contracts or get fired all the time. Same with teachers and academics.
So, no, the system rewarding the hospital manager and the university deans for the "vital" work of their nurses and teachers isn't "cleverly recursive"; it's exactly the failure mode both you and OP speak of, except it's somehow both systemic and personal, depending in what angle you're looking at.
> financial destitution by definition cannot affect producers of vital goods,
Say that to farmers struggling to make meets end. We managed to make production of vital goods so efficient, that we don't need as many producers, so they are becoming not-producers-of-vital-goods en masse. So, now that they don't produce vital goods, they can safely go into destitution?
> only an individual level failure (which isn’t to say that the individual is “to blame”, I am not talking moralistically
Individual level failure means individual is to blame. But UBI is meant to give them safety net, so that when they fail, they don't go into destitution.
> So at least what you mentioned cannot result in systemic failure from a mechanistic point of view, only an individual level failure (which isn’t to say that the individual is “to blame”, I am not talking moralistically, just that it affects individuals and not the entire structure
Nice, but when you get rid of 20% of people and move them into "not usable, you won't eat now" category, each single one for personal reasons, then another 20% for other personal reason, you have to train them somehow. You could of course say that they should retrain on their own, but that's currently done typically after several years of giving them too low prices, so they used up their safety reserve.
> On first paragraph, okay how does that scale though. Who does the actual work of producing things people need to live
The people who feel they have the skills for this. Just like right now.
> and how do we make sure that enough people keep doing that specifically,
We have enough people to make food. We have to make artifical limits on how much food they produce or they would flood the market with food. We pay them to keep their fields unused for some time, kept in reserve. UBI would just be a guarantee that they won't go into destitution when they can't sell the food at good price.
> “birth rate increases because people have more free time which means now you need more farming”
I think birth rate might decrease even more. As people become more and more comfortable and stopped having to work as much as previously, they don't need children to secure their future.
> We need to characterize these dynamics, wouldn’t you say? Have you thought about it, or are you satisfied by hand waving?
I agree we should. Who would do it? Who would pay for such characterisation? Maybe you should try to do it? A lot of people think about it already.
Or, ya know, save money or get a job. Failure rarely leads to homeless and starvation. Most people are far more resilient than that, the current US homeless rate is ~1/500
If we need/want UBI to be a thing, educating people on the difference is going to part of the effort and debate
Necessities get made because there's someone to buy them. Only 5% of people are employed in agriculture and 15% in manufacturing. 80% of working people could do nothing and we'd still be fine when it comes to necessities. And we don't even have peak automation.
UBI discussion invariably is way off the mark. The only thing UBI solves is how to give out the money, which is a massive misdirection, the real problem is how to get the money. Do you gut the state and allow people who don't work to have enough money to barely survive as an underclass, or do you end billionaires and usher in a new renaissance where all needs are met and labour shall just be at our whim. These two vastly different visions are both UBI, but most discussion about UBI completely sidesteps that as it requires touching upon the more difficult issues.
Once you have control of the money to give out, literally every way of redistribution is as good as UBI. If you calculate how much money would be required for a reasonable UBI.. then imagine what could be done if that money was spent on communal, humane, services then it would be able to revolutionise the world every bit as much.
Isn’t hoarded wealth a no-op? It just reduces the supply of whatever they are hoarding.
Would the people benefit from redistributing the things they are hoarding? Corporate stock that pays little to no dividends, mainly? It’s not like they are hoarding wheat. I don’t really get what people think will happen if we redistribute the stored wealth.
All wealth is, is a claim to direct labor and materials, the magnitude of which is relative to the total amount of wealth competing to direct those at present. If some portion of the wealth is locked away, the labor and materials are still being deployed, just the total pool of wealth competing to direct them is smaller than it would be otherwise. Unlocking wealth does not actually bring more stuff into existence.
Now, it could redirect labor and materials used to built yachts or luxury homes into more practical goods. But my impression is that the labor and materials used for those things are minuscule compared to the overall economy, and most of the wealth of the very wealthy is not actually used for those sorts of things.
Is that the topic of discussion? I thought it was something along the lines of “tax the rich so we can do things with the money”. That is the area I’m saying it is a no-op in. Statements without context frequently don’t mean the same as what they mean with context.
this argument ignores basic opportunity costs.
taxing that wealth allows the state to redirect labor and materials production and distribution toward high-utility public goods: high-speed rail, dense urban cores, and affordable housing. instead of subsidizing insolvent suburbs, we could be modernizing the logistics network and actually growing the real economy.
worse, you completely miss the political dimension. hoarded wealth buys the lobbying power to prevent these necessary structural changes. you are engaging in the exact kind of apologetics that has led to american infrastructure collapsing while the capital class extracts rent. thinking that resource allocation is a 'no-op' is economically illiterate
But by doing this you are just making everything else more expensive, that’s the point.
Printing money and spending it on those projects would have literally the same effect.
I’m responding to what I infer as the notion that people must have to say what they say about UBI, which is the implicit “we will pay for X and that will be it” not “we will make other goods more expensive in order to have X, and how we are happening to implement that is by taxing the rich”.
Like how about we just eliminate corporate-government corruption? Like there are a lot of shit business people today with a lot of shit politicians in their pockets, and many of them did not legitimately earn what they have, but is it really better to prevent the accumulation of capital over a certain amount? Then the powerful in your society are <checks notes> people who won a popularity contest.
This is an oversimplification IMO. There are higher order effects on the price of gold that makes it not directly related to the value of the dollar.
I'm pointing this out because I have seen a lot of sentiment recently about how the dollar is crashing, just look at the price of gold. Yes, the dollar is decreasing in value faster than usual, but it also isn't crashing in the way that gold is spiking.
This sentiment I think drives speculative gold demand, from standard speculative investing FOMO as well as from emotionally driven inflation fear well beyond what is realistic. The same thing happens to the stock market.
You can call it emotionally driven, but if it’s taken as a fact that the dollar is and will continue to lose value ( and the president is incentivized to pump the price of Bitcoin, whatever level of hell/episode of Mr Robot that is) - then you should expect gold to go up infinitely, relative to a worthless dollar. People aren’t necessarily trading out of fear, just trying to predict the future.
But the perception of future worthlessness of the dollar cannot actually make the dollar worthless. It doesn't work like that.
In a theoretical scenario where there are many competing substitutable currencies it should work like that, but we are not in that theoretical scenario, are we?
Wouldn’t gold be spiking in proportion to the market’s predicted future value of the dollar, rather than its current value? If the market’s paying attention you’d expect its gold valuation to lead the actual inflation numbers.
It does but that is the first order effect only. You also have people buying gold because number going up means number goes up more. This has a positive feedback loop since the people buying for that reason also makes number go up, which sucks in more people. You also have people bandwagoning hyperinflation type scenarios without a plausible thesis, which results in I think much more hedging in this area than usual. I hadn’t seen hyperinflation as a topic break into the mainstream before. You also have opportunistic savvy speculation that is based on a perception of the perception of the people doing the other ones. And probably more scenarios since there are a lot of interactions possible at higher orders.
So like some of the increase in gold price is due to the decrease in dollar value, certainly, but it isn’t all of it, and at the present time I don’t believe it is near to most of it.
The oil can be sold today profitably at today’s market rate.
If there stopped being from the outside competition for the oil, wouldn’t that roughly balance out stopping the supply of oil from the outside?
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