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0 pointseuroderf2y ago0 comments

> UBI, healthcare for everyone, access to housing etc are all things that can and should be done already. The more that work is automated away, the more crucial these become.

This is going to require taxation. Maybe a wealth tax ? Maybe fed-level Georgism ?

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lesuorac2y ago

I suspect it'll mostly go the other way where UBI really means just shelter and food.

UBI [1] is a pre-industrial era concept. The world inflation-adjusted GDP has grown from basically 500B to 100T [2]; like it's a pretty hard sell that you can't get UBI (as envisioned pre-telephones) to work with a 200x increase.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income#16th_ce... [2]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-gdp-over-the-last-t...

JKCalhoun2y ago

Sadly, I think UBI covering shelter and food is optimistic. If the past is any indicator UBI just means a rent increase and we hand over our UBI to the landlords.

chimprich2y ago

Would we still have landlords in a post-scarcity future? Surely if all wealth is being generated by AIs, it's the end of capitalism.

Even if we introduced UBI today, this doesn't make much sense. It wouldn't mean everyone just gets more cash because tax would have to rise to compensate.

I think you're imagining that landlords would think, "oh everyone is getting an extra 100 zorkmids a month, so I can raise rents by 100 zorkmids". But it couldn't work like that because the cash has to come from somewhere; what would actually happen is that someone receiving 100 zorkmids in benefits now gets 100 zorkmids in UBI, and someone who was paying 100 zorkmids in tax now pays 200 zorkmids in tax and gets 100 zorkmids in UBI.

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