Universal basic income, the utopian idea resurging in Silicon Valley(www.lemonde.fr)
5 pointsby nreece4 hours ago2 comments
  • _wire_2 hours ago
    Today working class income is eaten by ever-increasing rent.

    Add UBI. What keeps it from also being eaten by increasing rent?

  • rvz3 hours ago
    Name a permanent large scale universal basic income (UBI) programme that is working today right now and is economically sustainable to a country supporting tens of millions and to hundreds of millions of people paid a basic liveable income.

    No short-term experiments or one-off payments supporting less than 1 million. An actual UBI programme in place.

    Use all those chatbots and search engines you want and you'll see why no examples exist and it is simply dismissed as a failed utopian idea.

    • jleyank3 hours ago
      Yet if AI works well, the number of well-paid workers will be reduced. In a consumer economy, this is a bad thing. Remove too many salaries and there's insufficient demand to keep things going. UBI in some form will be needed to maintain consumerism.
      • ggm3 hours ago
        What does money even mean in this situation? It's functionally no different to a ration book: If its universal its needs-based, not production-based. It has to be set at a level which supports the discretionary consumption needed to sustain pricing of the goods now made by machines.

        In effect UBI is "Pooh, thats not capitalism honey, its ... "

        • jleyank3 hours ago
          It's a political problem until the replicators show up. And that'll be a while.
    • j5dgx762 hours ago
      Well people once upon a time believed countries could not survive without colonization and slavery. They believed accumulating gold was the only sustainable path and therefore all resources in the economy should be devoted to exports. Obviously what comes out of a 3 inch chimp brain as it reacts to complex dynamical systems too large to fit or keep updated within said 3 inch space, should not be studied too religiously. The path of the hurricane is not controlled by the chimp. We just learn coping mechs and story gen to hide our limitations in controlling some systems. The debates are part of the cope theatre and a waste of time and energy.