Universal Basic Income is Not a Solution - The Hated One
video description
Date: 2022-03-20
Related videos
Comments and reviews: 10
Chance
-6: 00ish -I'm not convinced that this idea would include all of us equally, and that with universal basic income, we would all be granted universal equal access to the distribution of wealth. - -and because I think the latter is impossible, and that a permanent, hierarchical system would be inevitable with this proposal, I cannot support the Universal Basic Income in the current state of affairs. -
There's already a permanent hierarchical system built into the nature of individuality. People differ on thousands of different traits, and wherever those traits are most adaptive those people will shine. A natural hierarchy thus ensues. You want people who are highly compassionate, have high tolerance for blood, bile, etc, and who are smart enough to understand the mechanisms of the body to be doctors. We want them at the top of our medical hierarchies. We want hierarchies, we just want them based on merit.
So, that's a pipe dream (and not even a good one, who wants to be the same as everyone else on every dimension. Now, what do you do in the limit when AI becomes the best at everything we care about? You want them to -rule-. in at least the sense that they protect us, the biome, and everything we care about. along with helping us enrich our own lives and find our own purposes. But in the nearer-term, what do you do with these massively wealthy companies with the technology and expertise to produce all the value that's being produced in the world? You want them to make jobs for you, a la Bernie Sanders? A guaranteed jobs program. So you make them spend their near infinite resources to create jobs for you. But why? Is work all you want? That seems fairly off.
Maybe you want them to cede ownership of the means of production to you? Sounds good on paper. So, how would they do that? There's billions of us and a few of them. How would you have them distribute their powers to us? Would you have them build us physical factories? Now we can make things. But we can only make one or two kinds of things at a single factory. Somehow we'd need an omniscient central planner to make all the things we want. Ok, maybe when we take the reigns of Google we can do that. But wait a minute, aren't we just having them make us jobs again in this case? What are these factories for? Ditch digging and filling back in? We won't be producing value there, that's for sure: these companies can already do that autonomously. So maybe we should just divy up their companies! But how? Just have them give us all their stocks?
But what can the average person do with small stocks in every company?
I suggest instead you'd rather do something more abstract, easily used and easily transferred; something with durability, portability, divisibility, uniformity, universal acceptability and the ability to track how many resources they have to give us. Well, I hate to tell you, -The hated one-, but you've just rediscovered money. And with that, your reasoning taken to the limit shows you are also committed to universal basic income.
reply
-6: 00ish -I'm not convinced that this idea would include all of us equally, and that with universal basic income, we would all be granted universal equal access to the distribution of wealth. - -and because I think the latter is impossible, and that a permanent, hierarchical system would be inevitable with this proposal, I cannot support the Universal Basic Income in the current state of affairs. -
There's already a permanent hierarchical system built into the nature of individuality. People differ on thousands of different traits, and wherever those traits are most adaptive those people will shine. A natural hierarchy thus ensues. You want people who are highly compassionate, have high tolerance for blood, bile, etc, and who are smart enough to understand the mechanisms of the body to be doctors. We want them at the top of our medical hierarchies. We want hierarchies, we just want them based on merit.
So, that's a pipe dream (and not even a good one, who wants to be the same as everyone else on every dimension. Now, what do you do in the limit when AI becomes the best at everything we care about? You want them to -rule-. in at least the sense that they protect us, the biome, and everything we care about. along with helping us enrich our own lives and find our own purposes. But in the nearer-term, what do you do with these massively wealthy companies with the technology and expertise to produce all the value that's being produced in the world? You want them to make jobs for you, a la Bernie Sanders? A guaranteed jobs program. So you make them spend their near infinite resources to create jobs for you. But why? Is work all you want? That seems fairly off.
Maybe you want them to cede ownership of the means of production to you? Sounds good on paper. So, how would they do that? There's billions of us and a few of them. How would you have them distribute their powers to us? Would you have them build us physical factories? Now we can make things. But we can only make one or two kinds of things at a single factory. Somehow we'd need an omniscient central planner to make all the things we want. Ok, maybe when we take the reigns of Google we can do that. But wait a minute, aren't we just having them make us jobs again in this case? What are these factories for? Ditch digging and filling back in? We won't be producing value there, that's for sure: these companies can already do that autonomously. So maybe we should just divy up their companies! But how? Just have them give us all their stocks?
But what can the average person do with small stocks in every company?
I suggest instead you'd rather do something more abstract, easily used and easily transferred; something with durability, portability, divisibility, uniformity, universal acceptability and the ability to track how many resources they have to give us. Well, I hate to tell you, -The hated one-, but you've just rediscovered money. And with that, your reasoning taken to the limit shows you are also committed to universal basic income.
reply
chaotic_enby
I think it depends on what you mean by universal basic income. There isn-t just one model of universal basic income, there-s many.
Your video mainly talks about that kind of ubi, in which jobs would become completely obsolete. But there is also the kind of ubi model in which jobs as we know them would continue to exist, but ubi would replace current systems to keep poor people from starvation and homelessness by giving them an amount of money that-s enough to be able to fulfil those needs. In the less radical ubi model, this money that is paid to poor people would instead be paid to all people, with wages serving the purpose of increasing your standard of living. This would of course come with higher taxes to get the money. This system would make the gap between poor and rich people smaller by breaking up mechanisms that discourage jobless people from getting jobs, like for example that they would get less money from their job than they did from the government before. It would also reduce unnecessary paperwork, as you wouldn-t need this whole bureaucracy of who gets money from the state and who doesn-t. It is possible that the money the state would spend on ubi would be less than the amount it spends on the bureaucracy that would become obsolete with ubi now.
There are multiple concepts of ubi, not just the one you criticized in the video, please keep that in mind.
reply
I think it depends on what you mean by universal basic income. There isn-t just one model of universal basic income, there-s many.
Your video mainly talks about that kind of ubi, in which jobs would become completely obsolete. But there is also the kind of ubi model in which jobs as we know them would continue to exist, but ubi would replace current systems to keep poor people from starvation and homelessness by giving them an amount of money that-s enough to be able to fulfil those needs. In the less radical ubi model, this money that is paid to poor people would instead be paid to all people, with wages serving the purpose of increasing your standard of living. This would of course come with higher taxes to get the money. This system would make the gap between poor and rich people smaller by breaking up mechanisms that discourage jobless people from getting jobs, like for example that they would get less money from their job than they did from the government before. It would also reduce unnecessary paperwork, as you wouldn-t need this whole bureaucracy of who gets money from the state and who doesn-t. It is possible that the money the state would spend on ubi would be less than the amount it spends on the bureaucracy that would become obsolete with ubi now.
There are multiple concepts of ubi, not just the one you criticized in the video, please keep that in mind.
reply
skaltura
UBI is difficult concept. However, automation is making things cheaper and cheaper, and everyone's living standards are vastly increasing. People has a knack of finding stuff to do as well.
However, UBI has the potential to eliminate a lot of excess bureaucracy welfare and aid programs, which cost tremendous sums of money to just maintain. If there was an UBI program, it could save the govt money, and in combination of sensible entry level salary taxation could give people the freedom to find what they like doing the best. Albeit, there will be people who just don't want to get a job, and will always demand more, and as they get more, the group increases and it can spiral out of control. On the other hand, there are things we all enjoy but really is not profitable as a career, such as arts. Also coding FOSS projects can be such, i am sure there would be a lot more people just working on FOSS projects if they do not need to worry about basics as much and still could collect donations & sponsorships without loosing welfare, like it is now in most places.
It is complicated, everything disruptive always is. With proper checks & balances it could be really good thing. Unfortunately, those proper checks & balances are either typically under constant attack or did not exist in the first place.
reply
UBI is difficult concept. However, automation is making things cheaper and cheaper, and everyone's living standards are vastly increasing. People has a knack of finding stuff to do as well.
However, UBI has the potential to eliminate a lot of excess bureaucracy welfare and aid programs, which cost tremendous sums of money to just maintain. If there was an UBI program, it could save the govt money, and in combination of sensible entry level salary taxation could give people the freedom to find what they like doing the best. Albeit, there will be people who just don't want to get a job, and will always demand more, and as they get more, the group increases and it can spiral out of control. On the other hand, there are things we all enjoy but really is not profitable as a career, such as arts. Also coding FOSS projects can be such, i am sure there would be a lot more people just working on FOSS projects if they do not need to worry about basics as much and still could collect donations & sponsorships without loosing welfare, like it is now in most places.
It is complicated, everything disruptive always is. With proper checks & balances it could be really good thing. Unfortunately, those proper checks & balances are either typically under constant attack or did not exist in the first place.
reply
Joseph
I think the issue of mass joblessness is far closer than you think. Using the numbers from the US 1 in 5 people are already unemployable and the situation is only going to get worse. I think the final thing to require UBI will be the mass deployment of self-driving vehicles. In the US there are 3m jobs in trucking alone and it is the most common job in the US and when you think about it everything from trash pick up to pizza delivery can be replaced with this technology. The issue is that not everyone is capable of -moving up- in quality of employment. Most people are simply not capable of being engineers or scientists or other high intelligence demand fields and even if they could it would cause mass oversaturation of these fields. Eventually, even high demand fields will be replaced with some form of automation eventualy. As much as I hate the idea of UBI I simply can't think of another solution and UBI will have some issues accompanying it. Most people need something to do to make themselves feel useful and justify their existence and even those that don't still need for that reason need it to help keep them grounded. The only other solution I can think of is the outlawing of most forms of automation but that would basically economically handycap any nation implementing it.
reply
I think the issue of mass joblessness is far closer than you think. Using the numbers from the US 1 in 5 people are already unemployable and the situation is only going to get worse. I think the final thing to require UBI will be the mass deployment of self-driving vehicles. In the US there are 3m jobs in trucking alone and it is the most common job in the US and when you think about it everything from trash pick up to pizza delivery can be replaced with this technology. The issue is that not everyone is capable of -moving up- in quality of employment. Most people are simply not capable of being engineers or scientists or other high intelligence demand fields and even if they could it would cause mass oversaturation of these fields. Eventually, even high demand fields will be replaced with some form of automation eventualy. As much as I hate the idea of UBI I simply can't think of another solution and UBI will have some issues accompanying it. Most people need something to do to make themselves feel useful and justify their existence and even those that don't still need for that reason need it to help keep them grounded. The only other solution I can think of is the outlawing of most forms of automation but that would basically economically handycap any nation implementing it.
reply
Vote
Abolishing slavery was thought of as a utopian dream, so was equal rights for women, and even democracy itself was once a -pipe dream utopia-. Sure, there will never be a utopia in the true sense of the word, but if we try, we do have the will and means to get kind of close to that, but not quite. The UBI would provide about $1000 per adult in the usa per month, that's not exactly a kings ransom, but it would let people who are at or near the poverty level fair much better so they can perhaps improve themselves when they are able to get a higher education for an even better job/position.
If we can spend $700 billion dollars on a bloated military EVERY YEAR, we can afford to do this. I calculate the brute force cost of this to net around $600 billion a year. Our GDP size can absorb that cost. And a lot of that money will be put back into the same economy when consumers do what they do best. consume-
reply
Abolishing slavery was thought of as a utopian dream, so was equal rights for women, and even democracy itself was once a -pipe dream utopia-. Sure, there will never be a utopia in the true sense of the word, but if we try, we do have the will and means to get kind of close to that, but not quite. The UBI would provide about $1000 per adult in the usa per month, that's not exactly a kings ransom, but it would let people who are at or near the poverty level fair much better so they can perhaps improve themselves when they are able to get a higher education for an even better job/position.
If we can spend $700 billion dollars on a bloated military EVERY YEAR, we can afford to do this. I calculate the brute force cost of this to net around $600 billion a year. Our GDP size can absorb that cost. And a lot of that money will be put back into the same economy when consumers do what they do best. consume-
reply
Charles
We could always make a move to remove income as a status requirement entirely. Once we reach a point of near full automation, what's to stop people pursuing creative or intellectual pursuits once they no longer have the need to sell 80% of their week to work for someone else's profits and then be given a small portion to survive off of. This of course would be under the assumption that automation would be outright excluded from political practice (I. E. removing the need for money, removes money in politics) and live in a world built upon ideas, pursuits of intellectualism and culture? This is all assuming we are able to escape the deathgrasp of marketing hawks who need money to exist in the first place. I really don't see -trade and market- disappearing with the elimination of income. Simply give people sovereign control of their own lives. Perhaps I am too idealist.
reply
We could always make a move to remove income as a status requirement entirely. Once we reach a point of near full automation, what's to stop people pursuing creative or intellectual pursuits once they no longer have the need to sell 80% of their week to work for someone else's profits and then be given a small portion to survive off of. This of course would be under the assumption that automation would be outright excluded from political practice (I. E. removing the need for money, removes money in politics) and live in a world built upon ideas, pursuits of intellectualism and culture? This is all assuming we are able to escape the deathgrasp of marketing hawks who need money to exist in the first place. I really don't see -trade and market- disappearing with the elimination of income. Simply give people sovereign control of their own lives. Perhaps I am too idealist.
reply
Robbo
This video is rubbish on so many levels.
I will limit myself to point out only the main faults: receiving UBI doesn't mean that you are not allowed to open your own business or look for alternative jobs; it is more like a safety net that allows you to live decently and care for your family in regards to basic needs. You would still receive UBI even if you're getting an other income. Some people will be happy enough to live with UBI and follow their own passions, some others won't and will find a way to make more money.
The problem with corrupted governments, greedy corporations and monopolies exist now already, UBI cannot be blamed if once implemented things won't change in that respect. It is the people, now as ever, that need to unite and stand up to that kind of malice if we want to have a more just and equal society.
reply
This video is rubbish on so many levels.
I will limit myself to point out only the main faults: receiving UBI doesn't mean that you are not allowed to open your own business or look for alternative jobs; it is more like a safety net that allows you to live decently and care for your family in regards to basic needs. You would still receive UBI even if you're getting an other income. Some people will be happy enough to live with UBI and follow their own passions, some others won't and will find a way to make more money.
The problem with corrupted governments, greedy corporations and monopolies exist now already, UBI cannot be blamed if once implemented things won't change in that respect. It is the people, now as ever, that need to unite and stand up to that kind of malice if we want to have a more just and equal society.
reply
Facu
1) about automation being only of the most powerfull and all of that i have this answer: while time goes on the cost of owning, producing and using machines will decrease (as it actually happens now, so everyone could have acces to making an aoutomatized industry
2) and about no jobs actually the studys made in every country in which the time of earning money just above the poverty line have proven that production was actually incentiviced and people were a lot more likely to be entrepeneurs
3) Both points i made actually complements themselves
4) i encourage you to make that research yourself! check studys from canada, namibia(an african city) brasil, etc.
reply
1) about automation being only of the most powerfull and all of that i have this answer: while time goes on the cost of owning, producing and using machines will decrease (as it actually happens now, so everyone could have acces to making an aoutomatized industry
2) and about no jobs actually the studys made in every country in which the time of earning money just above the poverty line have proven that production was actually incentiviced and people were a lot more likely to be entrepeneurs
3) Both points i made actually complements themselves
4) i encourage you to make that research yourself! check studys from canada, namibia(an african city) brasil, etc.
reply
We
Your idea that people who are currently employed for low wages (ie: the majority of people today) have more power over the system than those who aren't employed at all is completely asinine. In most cases, any given worker is very easily replaced and wouldn't be missed at all if that person were to suddenly cease to exist. In that sense there would be no reduction in the amount of influence that individual has on the system if UBI was implemented.
reply
Your idea that people who are currently employed for low wages (ie: the majority of people today) have more power over the system than those who aren't employed at all is completely asinine. In most cases, any given worker is very easily replaced and wouldn't be missed at all if that person were to suddenly cease to exist. In that sense there would be no reduction in the amount of influence that individual has on the system if UBI was implemented.
reply
Will
UBI is just another government trick to lull the masses into obedience (and to dumb us down. It is presented like a carrot on a stick, but most can't see this. The government knows that most people will go for the bait. We are headed in the wrong direction, unfortunately. If you're paid to exist as meagerly as UBI would be, truly how much incentive would you muster to be innovative, get ahead in life, to succeed and be independent?
reply
UBI is just another government trick to lull the masses into obedience (and to dumb us down. It is presented like a carrot on a stick, but most can't see this. The government knows that most people will go for the bait. We are headed in the wrong direction, unfortunately. If you're paid to exist as meagerly as UBI would be, truly how much incentive would you muster to be innovative, get ahead in life, to succeed and be independent?
reply
Add a review, comment
Other channel videos
