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Naive question perhaps, but if there was a situation where, say, AI eliminated or reduced so many jobs that UBI was introduced, who would pay for it?
if a theoretical 40% of the workers payed for it, i can't imagine it would be enough.
if they fiat printed, that would just cause an inflation spiral, and you'd be back to square one.
What do ubi proponents say about this?
I'm not exactly a UBI proponent, although I think it could be part of a reform plan.
The thinking on the scenario you describe is that productivity would have to be so heightened, to cause that degree of unemployment, that the real cost of living would be reduced to a tiny fraction of what it currently is. So, a UBI would not cost nearly as much in that world as it would in ours.
I think it's very unlikely that we'll see that kind of static unemployment, though. More likely, in my mind, is that we'll see people reduce their work hours on other margins: fewer hours per week, more time off between jobs, retiring earlier, etc.
While labor force participation may be much lower, it wouldn't be that there's a huge class of unemployable people. Rather, there would be more people between jobs and working parttime.
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I think historically what we've seen with massive productivity gains is simply a shift in human labor hours to other industries.
So with AI, I'm predicting we'll see a reduction in human labor-hours spent on knowledge work, and an increase in the types of physical activities that aren't yet able to be replicated by AI, like personal care.
It's really hard to predict what new industries and technologies might emerge, too.
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This was the first relevant search result. People seem to have worked fewer hours as the Industrial Revolution unfolded, stabilizing around the modern 40 hours for the past 80 years or so. It may depend on just how revolutionary we expect this productivity gain to be.
A very recent trend, that's entirely new for labor economists, is that male labor force participation has begun declining. My advisor liked to joke about how simple men were to model in labor: "They work as much as they can and then they die."
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Hmm, interesting that it's been stable even through the computer and internet revolutions... which is where I think I was getting my thoughts about this from.
Hard to say how much of it is driven by market supply & demand vs. regulatory distortions. (Not sure if the 40 hour work week has any regulatory significance)
As to male labor force decline, I think I read that it correlates well with disability claims and video games.
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Yeah, video games are one of the leading explanations.
During the New Deal (I think), a bunch of labor regulations were put in place that somewhat entrenched the 40 hour work week.
As with much government do-goodery, a long-running beneficial trend stopped as soon as the government decided to help.
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38 sats \ 6 replies \ @OT 8h
Imagine a country using its power grids to mine Bitcoin and then distribute the rewards to it's citizens.
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That already happens. Bitcoin revenue from private mining ops paying for excess electricity generated permits the utility to lower rates for all ratepayers. This happens in Texas, Kenya, and elsewhere.
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It might be better to distribute the profits from the energy use rather than the Bitcoin itself. Although I don't socialist policies such as this are a good idea in any way shape or form.
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Or that, but I doubt there'd be much profits there (cutthroat industry, rewards competed down to break-even or less)
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @OT 8h
Probably unrealistic. It would be interesting to try though. Maybe for a small country or city.
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so a btc soverign wealth ubi?
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @OT 8h
IDK if it's possible, but it would be interesting. If they don't find a block for a few days people start starving
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105 sats \ 1 reply \ @denlillaapan 8h
Productivity?
We tax the machines for their output/value add etc.
Or some micro transaction cost (0.01% for every task AI runs)
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I can't begin to express how happy I am with my portable sovereign compute after reading this.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @javier 8h
If UBI is introduced to some countries, then it will be the end of those countries, as UBI is pure communism. If UBI is introduced to all countries, then it will be the end of the world.
If AI reduce some of the work in some sectors, then people will have to move to another sectors, change their specialization. If they don't do it, they should die. In nature, those not adapted perish. It's normal and it has to happen. If you fight against this universal law you will lose. You just can't fight against it, no matter how clever you think you are. You will be punished by nature by collapsing all the race. And perhaps the few that survived can recreate the world again, but who knows.
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A thread about using endowment funds #434123
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @lrm_btc 3h
UBI is just yet another fancy term for moving money unconsentually. We already do it, we will do it for the foreseeable future, and there's nothing good about it. Who cares if we invent new words for it?
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Look up endowment funds for homeless / poverty / public goods. People have floated the idea of keeping an endowment fund or trust to deal with UBI related stuff (housing, monthly expense payments).
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I think it's actually more likely than not, and not just some socialist re-distribution scheme from the productive to the unproductive to buy votes either.
What is inevitable is best to think of it as a a band-aid on a much larger gaping wound that is the debt-based monetary system, which is inherently a game of musical chairs where Cantillon insiders are the DJ.
If all the debt was paid off, there'd be 0 dollars in circulation, because there's literally more debt than there is money to pay it off. The few original international banks would own literally everything if they felt safe enough to stop the music.
Obviously this is necessitates some violent outcome that is in no-ones interests, except those few thousand lizard people with deep underground bunkers that would false-flag us into nuclear Armageddon in-lieu of payment. So, the more plausible outcome is an engineered soft-landing with a new base money instead of letting the world fall into repossession.
Some form of UBI in this case would be a tacit debt jubilee, and will come out of a wind down of the financial sector.
We already know Bitcoin, by only accruing fairly, will force this downsizing of big finance. That's also why it's so important Bitcoin ends up in the legacy system in ways that seem icky to us, it's the trojan horse, or drinking its milkshake... pick your analogy.
Insurance companies and other forced buyers of fiat liabilities aren't actually people in the political sense, so they distribute the hit proportionally when this debt, otherwise known as financial assets, are destroyed one stimmy check at a time. Insurance companies are not so coincidentally buyers of the financialized bitcoin like MSTR notes etc, its how they thread the compliance needle to come out the other side of this.
Thinking about it in terms of productive wagies is antiquated factory lineworker minded thinking, that world hasn't existed in nearly 100 years. We're past peak financialization, because there can be no wealth re-distribution with Bitcoin, so the DOGE-Tariff-UBI psyop coming soon will be a controlled demolition of the legacy system.
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Inflation will fund it
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People commonly frame UBI as "communism", but there is a libertarian case to be made.
Reduce all government spending to near 0, redistribute all government cashflow to citizens in form of UBI.
This way government budget is no longer centrally planned (communist) but spent according to the needs of individual economic actors (free markets).
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Where does the gov cashflow come from? What does it mean near zero? It looks like some kind of perpetuum mobile...
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Not a naïve question at all. The real challenge, as I see it, isn’t just about funding — it’s designing a system that doesn’t collapse under its own weight.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @senf 7h
The AI
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A.I. wud fund it, of course! just like it has funded fiat for 300 years now, or longer, issuing tokens of allegiance; even if the original A.I. was a collective of people - that's psychopathic intelligence, not based in reality or natural law, just a bunch of psychos making sh!t up, believing they get to control other people!
as far as fiat printing: unlimited amount can be printed on the backend, but on the front end, limits can be imposed on how fast and for what one gets to use those fiat tokens; imagine 90% penalty on early withdrawal of retirement funds - what does it matter if the IOU fund made 10x?
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