Thank you for sharing your experiences. It’s a story of how the best intentions go awry due to human nature and how free markets are a way of working around this. The vibrancy and efficiency of motivated people competing to make things better is a strong and vital force in the society that fosters it, and to some extent people who grow up that way tend to take it for granted. Thank you for the reality check.
In a way, this is an argument, not for social Darwinism, but for creating the possibility to escape the mean. If you take a distribution and flatten it, you eliminate the worst outcomes, but you also eliminate the vibrant top and middle. I’m guessing that allowing for a bottom allows for a much more elevated middle.
In a sense, this means that the current system is working as intended: wealth inequality gives us the highest middle.
If we ignored housing, then “free market + some taxation and giving the money to the poor” kinda sounds like the best of both words. Unfortunately, the increasing rents can eat the extra money given to the poor. (See also: Georgism.)
Maybe if we could get UBI high enough that people could survive on that alone, it would no longer be necessary to live in cities (close to good jobs) and people could avoid paying too high rent. Or maybe not, because ultimately all land belongs to someone? Not sure.
Georgism for sure. When we build the political will to reclaim all titles to land and charge leases held for the public by the government, UBI is easily and appropriately funded. As you say though, the question is whether it will ever be enough to live on given other market forces.
My hope has been that a system like the one I described can get ahead of all of it by defining the minimum purchasing power as exactly what’s necessary to live on. In principle this only works when the economy has a high post scarcity multiplier, that is, one unit of work gives you four or more units of goods. As you mentioned before, automation may not be there yet, but as a hint of things to come, our current per capita GDP is double the current living wage floor.
Thank you for sharing your experiences. It’s a story of how the best intentions go awry due to human nature and how free markets are a way of working around this. The vibrancy and efficiency of motivated people competing to make things better is a strong and vital force in the society that fosters it, and to some extent people who grow up that way tend to take it for granted. Thank you for the reality check.
In a way, this is an argument, not for social Darwinism, but for creating the possibility to escape the mean. If you take a distribution and flatten it, you eliminate the worst outcomes, but you also eliminate the vibrant top and middle. I’m guessing that allowing for a bottom allows for a much more elevated middle.
In a sense, this means that the current system is working as intended: wealth inequality gives us the highest middle.
If we ignored housing, then “free market + some taxation and giving the money to the poor” kinda sounds like the best of both words. Unfortunately, the increasing rents can eat the extra money given to the poor. (See also: Georgism.)
Maybe if we could get UBI high enough that people could survive on that alone, it would no longer be necessary to live in cities (close to good jobs) and people could avoid paying too high rent. Or maybe not, because ultimately all land belongs to someone? Not sure.
Georgism for sure. When we build the political will to reclaim all titles to land and charge leases held for the public by the government, UBI is easily and appropriately funded. As you say though, the question is whether it will ever be enough to live on given other market forces.
My hope has been that a system like the one I described can get ahead of all of it by defining the minimum purchasing power as exactly what’s necessary to live on. In principle this only works when the economy has a high post scarcity multiplier, that is, one unit of work gives you four or more units of goods. As you mentioned before, automation may not be there yet, but as a hint of things to come, our current per capita GDP is double the current living wage floor.