You've already lost me. This is provably false, as any programmer should know: if you sit down and code something useful today, you've just increased the amount of capital in the world. Out of thin air. A carpenter who buys a bunch of lumber and turns it into a thousand-dollar piece of furniture does the same. The more people can learn to add value to the world, and the more value they can add, the bigger the total pie of wealth can grow.
Investment distributes wealth primarily from the elite to the slightly-less elite. It doesn't break the cycle of poverty and immediate survival focus that prevents millions and millions of potential Einsteins or Feynmans or Musks from doing anything with their lives other than scraping by.
> Investment distributes wealth primarily from the elite to the slightly-less elite.
If you've seen how China changed in the last couple decades, you'd see how this obviously isn't true. Basically all electronics are manufactured in a developing Asian country by the children of subsidence farmers.
This, in turn, is what made it possible for us today to enjoy a high standard of living unimaginable back then.
The world is actually full of such examples. There's quite a bit of work done in psychology and sociology as to why this happens. Often, the move from, for example substinence farming to other jobs is a kind of throffer - and so it was, historically documented, in the 16th and 17th centuries in England, too with the move from rural cottage industry to wide-scale factory production.
The industrial revolution started in the late 18th century. Keep in mind that the population was booming then, so there wasn't enough space on the cottage to support the same standard of living.
I feel like the concept of a idyllic peasant is the modern iteration of the "noble savage." For complex decisions, you indeed run into the paradox of choice and other strange psychological phenomena. However, choice between sacrificing time in order to accumulate capital is an easy one, as this has been done billions of times. You need extraordinary evidence to prove otherwise.
>However, choice between sacrificing time in order to accumulate capital is an easy one, as this has been done billions of times.
It's curious why so much land had to be expropriated forcefully if it were such an obvious choice to the modern-day noble savages - and even moreso when one considers modern union activity and intense revolts against the increasing duration and intensity of the working day in America, and to no lesser extent other countries which did not have the privilege of being so readily acquainted with capital. These are no edge cases either. The largest debate in the literature being the question of why the majority does not rise up against the unfair conditions implemented by a minority. Whether you subscribe to the false consciousness solution or the capability solution, both allow you to say that the "rational choice" of not rising up (or accumulating capital) is simply an element of playing the game. The only difference between the theories turns on the point of whether the players know it's a game or not.
Consider the notion of leverage where both A and B can increase their capital more in absolute value if some part of A's significant capital is redistributed to poorer B. UBI just takes risk out of this equation so A does not have to lend to B in order for this to happen. Though yeah, this makes A poorer in absolute value than they would have been without this sneaky taxation (= involuntary expropriation of money).
For society, the risk is that A is more efficient at investing money than a blind redistribution scheme. That's a multi-trillion dollar gamble.
Give money to the poor and most of it will end up back at the rich. It doesn’t work as well trickling down.
1. Apple spends $10 million dollars to build a factory in a developing country. This creates 2,000 jobs over a couple years. These people can finally afford to see a doctor and heat up their homes during the winter.
2. Apple gets taxed $10 million that funds 1000 people's UBI. Their lives are somewhat less stressful. There is a higher demand for Iphones, so Apple can charge a bit more money for them. After a decade, they are able to open an additional factory. However, within that decade, 100 people in that developing country died of a disease that would be easily cured with medicine had they had they been able to work at the factory 10 years ago.
There is a limited amount of capital in the world. Distributing it now might help those at home, but it does not help the billion people who still lack electricity. There simply is not enough capital in the world to build trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure for free. Investment is a much better vehicle for distribution than UBI as it also creates wealth.