My rough first attempt at explaining the apparent paradox of poverty continuing to exist despite a ~100x increase in productivity:
Humanity as a whole may have gotten 100x more productive, but most people aren’t able to individually contribute 100x more value to the economy (at least not in a way that they are monetarily compensated for). It seems like the increase in productivity largely takes the form of finding more efficient ways to coordinate the efforts of many people (e.g. factories) rather than individuals being able to produce more value on their own, and that the few people doing the coordinating are reaping the benefits of this much more than the many people being coordinated. Even in areas where the potential for individual productivity has greatly increased (e.g. digitally producing games, videos, music, etc.), attention remains scarce, people largely pay attention to things that already have attention, and again only a small number of people are able to produce such content and have a large number of people consume and pay for it.
If humanity’s 100x productivity increase took the form of 100% of people becoming 100x more productive, and poverty persisted, that would indeed be pretty strong evidence for some sort of Poverty Restoring Force, but my sense is that it’s a closer approximation of what actually happened to say that 1% of people became 10,000x more productive, in which case observing that many of the other 99% who were previously in poverty continue to be in poverty is not surprising—it’s not an observation that requires one to postulate Poverty Restoring Forces in order to explain. For this reason, I continue to lean towards optimism about UBI being an effective means of reducing poverty.
My rough first attempt at explaining the apparent paradox of poverty continuing to exist despite a ~100x increase in productivity:
Humanity as a whole may have gotten 100x more productive, but most people aren’t able to individually contribute 100x more value to the economy (at least not in a way that they are monetarily compensated for). It seems like the increase in productivity largely takes the form of finding more efficient ways to coordinate the efforts of many people (e.g. factories) rather than individuals being able to produce more value on their own, and that the few people doing the coordinating are reaping the benefits of this much more than the many people being coordinated. Even in areas where the potential for individual productivity has greatly increased (e.g. digitally producing games, videos, music, etc.), attention remains scarce, people largely pay attention to things that already have attention, and again only a small number of people are able to produce such content and have a large number of people consume and pay for it.
If humanity’s 100x productivity increase took the form of 100% of people becoming 100x more productive, and poverty persisted, that would indeed be pretty strong evidence for some sort of Poverty Restoring Force, but my sense is that it’s a closer approximation of what actually happened to say that 1% of people became 10,000x more productive, in which case observing that many of the other 99% who were previously in poverty continue to be in poverty is not surprising—it’s not an observation that requires one to postulate Poverty Restoring Forces in order to explain. For this reason, I continue to lean towards optimism about UBI being an effective means of reducing poverty.