imu-li asked: How would you incentivize a voluntary basic income system/agreement?
Basic income just a statist stop-gap solution. Soft material post-scarcity in high-tech communities based on mutual aid, solidarity and usage of even low-productivity labor where its comparative disadvantage is the lowest. If one were to run the numbers, accounting for the fact that a lot of stuff is artificially expensive, maintaining a lifestyle that can support human dignity in a free-as-in-speech society would be quite cheap. The present support for massive sprawling states with huge taxation shows that people are willing to sacrifice from the fruits of their own labor for the sake of others. Deliberate social engineering efforts to establish planned intentional communities supportive of such arrangements and avoiding the segregation of high- and low-productivity people. Utilizing the social mechanisms currently driving gentrification to create incentives for economic desegregation instead. Eradicating inhumane structures destroying many people’s productive ability. Organic property rights settling allocation questions to optimize human preferences while eliminating forms of useless rentseeking. Strong reputational systems giving status incentives for sharing. Normalizing EA memes. Minimizing coordination costs of such systems with technological solutions. Decentralizing control of productive capital via minifacturing etc.
A fully-trained promethea would have a productivity around $100 000 a year at the minimum assuming no taxes etc., and a low-productivity person can be maintained for $5000 a year assuming elimination of artificial costs. A fully-trained promethea can thus easily maintain up to ten low-productivity persons, and will be incentivized to do so if said low-productivity persons are cool to have hanging around, because it’s subjectively better to invest in the company of interesting persons than many material things. GiveDirectly for low-productivity persons not cool to hang around, because them suffering deprivation is still in violation of my preferences.
The “GiveDirectly for low-productivity persons not cool to hang around” part is critical, because otherwise you have a very large part of the population whose well-being is dependent on their ability to impress a wealthy patron, which is not exactly conducive to freedom and human dignity.
A large part of why GiveDirectly and similar programs are so effective right now is that desperately poor people are very easy to find. In your utopia, you need to provide that aid to everyone who needs it, which is a considerably harder problem. There are essentially two strategies for ensuring that everyone who needs aid gets it: You can provide aid to everyone regardless of need, or you can set up a system for determining need on an individual basis. In other words, you can provide a guaranteed basic income, or you can provide welfare. The same problems that apply to welfare-as-it-exists would apply to welfare-as-charity, so I have to assume that you’d favor the charity establishing a basic income. So, going with your numbers and assuming negligible overhead costs (ha!) that charity will need to receive $5000 per person per year in donations.
Right now, the average annual contribution to all charities by a person in the U.S. is around $1000, and most of those charities are considerably better at generating fuzzies than a universal basic income charity would be. How confident are you that the cultural changes needed to fund such a charity are even possible? What happens if they’re not?
We used to be called voluntary socialists…
Effectively, what I’m advocating is creating systems that have the sharing built-in. Basic income is a superior solution when things need to be rationed by bureaucratic systems, but if I had a coffeeshop and a person I knew to be poor came in, I’d just hand them an inexpensive sandwich for free instead of trying to establish a scheme of everyone chipping in a fraction of their income, especially if I was easily able to cash in the social rewards of doing so.
Gentrification shows that rich people like to live in areas that have a certain “vibrancy” and “authenticity” that homogenous high-income locations lack. The fact that gentrification routinely destroys those precise things is a market failure. It would be a mutually beneficial trade for high-income people to support an infrastructure that enables low-income people to coexist and flourish in the same environments, and it would look very different from “impress a wealthy patron”.
If I build a community which creates immaterial value to make it attractive to engineers and programmers and other high-productivity people, I’m able to charge them rents that are higher than in a boring gated community, and those rents could be used to supply a certain level of free stuff for the low-productivity people for “maintaining the atmosphere”. That’s something corps seem inherently very bad at doing; when they try it’s usually just phony and embarrassing, and there’s an obvious (albeit specifically very indirect) profit (or more like “”“profit”“”) to be made.
The result would be basically a private (private as in “privacy”, not private as in “privatized profits and socialized risks”) welfare state on a smaller scale, except without the bullshit, and the constant knowledge that it can be outcompeted if it gets bureaucratic and inefficient and doesn’t do its job properly. Even high-productivity people do actually voluntarily choose to live in the Nordic countries over the US, as astonishing as it might sound, as their combination of “this benefits me too” and “I want to support a system that takes care of people” makes them prefer that. All I’m asking is that they shouldn’t coercively monopolize things so that I’m subject to violence if I want to do things differently, such as by purchasing estrogen without asking the mob for permission first, or by not having corporate welfare and agricultural subsidies and omigad all the horrors.
Also, mutual aid societies can help people support each other, and social control can be used to ration resources so that people don’t over-consume. And simply having some stuff everyone can use works on a smaller scale; the true tragedy of the commons was that they allowed poor people to be free and the state colluded with landlords to eliminate that freedom.
Currency is ultimately a system of tracking favors people have done to each other and to enable reciprocity with anonymity, but when people know each other they don’t need special systems of tracking those things. And freedom of association can be used by people to preferentially associate with those who contribute to such a society: I can just pay more for my coffee at Queerbucks, knowing that they will provide Alice the poor person a free sandwich every day and pass the costs to people like me, instead of going to Starbucks which doesn’t do that thing.
And then there’s natural common-pool resources such as the atmosphere, aquifers etc.; there’s a very reasonable claim to be made that privatizing-mutualizing them so that their usage is limited to sustainable levels by setting a price on consuming them, and the profits after managing the resources distributed to people in a collective monopoly, would be a very good solution as it doesn’t interfere as much on productive economic activities as taxes. So in addition to watching that people don’t mess around irresponsibly with synthetic pathogens, Firewall would also collect rents from polluters, fishers, etc. and then redistribute the vast majority of the proceedings so it doesn’t get enough resources to establish greater authority over things.
(I know Firewall is starting to sound like a global state and mission creep would be a very dangerous prospect and it would have to be engineered very carefully to avoid it; but this is basically what I’d establish if I had unlimited power: an archipelago of voluntary systems and communities, with a carefully limited coordination mechanism for the stuff that absolutely needs to be coordinated, and which is practically capable of coordinating only those things through a combination of incentive engineering, ideological legitimacy, commitment systems to limit it etc.)
4 weeks ago · 9 notes · source: socialjusticemunchkin · .permalink
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