I mean it's the general fault in all the communication of politicians and media since the late 70s that depict receivers of social security as beggars and undeserving and everybody who is poor is responsible for it themselves. I know this varies a bit from country to country, but even in Germany where we have a "strong" social security system (although it was weakened in the early 00s), the general public's opinion is receivers of social benefits are freeloaders, even among poor people.

Although studies show time and again that even if you are able to become a higher-earner, it still won't make you rich. The strongest indication for wealth is inheritance. And the top percent (owners, not earners) also pay less tax per wealth. So why are they not depicted as freeloaders?

Probably in part because hanging on to wealth involves some degree of stewardship. Inheriting wealth is the best way to get rich, but you can inherit wealth, run through your inheritance and end up a pauper in short order.

Of course, that's abusable because "he who has the gold makes the rules." People from wealthy families tend to be in a better position than poor people to influence the laws that get written and this tends to foster a situation where "them that has, gets."

This is something we need to guard against. In order to have a healthy society, we need to actively work at making sure that being born into the lower classes (or falling into them) isn't a trap because of wealthy people actively sabotaging the efforts of poor people to build something of value and accrue value to themselves legitimately.

I'm not for UBI because it breaks that connection between wealth and the creation of value. It actively encourages people to forget how to be productive in a way that is plugged into the larger system (I'm a former homemaker -- I assure you, knowing how to be productive in a way that is good for your own life doesn't automatically teach you how to be productive in a way that plugs you into the world of paid work).

In order for human society to continue to have wealth, there must be incentives for all humans to find ways to add value to the system. One of the ways to add value to the system is with good stewardship.

It may not seem obviously like a skill, but I spent some time reading every article and watching every TV show I could about what happens to lottery winners and two-thirds are bankrupt within five years. So simply being handed a whole lot of money doesn't, per se, tell you how to keep it.

The concept of UBI is a concept of wealth as a giant pile of gold somewhere that we can just tap into. It's a broken mental model.

Societal wealth is an abundance of goods and services and it takes human wisdom and human effort and human self restraint to make sure societal wealth lives on and doesn't disappear suddenly. Once it's gone, it's a lot harder to recreate than it is to maintain the existence of.

I think UBI is a recipe for killing the goose that's laying the golden eggs. Our challenge currently in the world is to figure out where to go from here without doing that.

Stewardship (without being an abusive classist asshole crapping all over the lower classes and treating them as your de facto slaves) is a valid part of finding those solutions so we can foster a golden age instead of stumbling into a dark age as our next stage.

IMO, it’s worth it because we can’t halt progress because of socio-economic road blocks.

The amount of productivity and time lost fighting over piddling sums of money in a country that has trillion dollar budgets is not worth it.

Better to institute UBI if that will reduce noise. I used to be against UBI, but once that seed of free money has been planted, it’s going to be difficult to eradicate that weed seed bank. Thanks to start ups( hello, YC!) who experimented with giving out free money. Time to pay up and move on.

Inflation is merely the rise in price when demand exceeds supply. Since consumer inflation is dead it follows that there is an abundance of goods, primarily because companies have access to a lot of capital but they don't have to deploy that capital in the USA or Europe and actually employ workers there. They can simply deploy it in countries with low labor costs. In principle that is perfectly fine because countries like India and China deserve to grow but in practice it means that a lot of the money printing is completely misguided. It's like taking the wrong medicine. It won't cure you but you will still suffer from side effects. The end result is a lot of overalued stocks without any of the economic performance to justify their market cap.

Instead of a UBI it would make sense to have jobs programs that invest into public infrastructure like road maintenance or into the power grid. Those jobs cannot be shipped away to another country and they are the type of "busywork" that is actually useful without directly competing with private industry.

A previous comment by me:

I'm trying to say something like: When your caterpillar morphs into a butterfly, harping on how your butterfly is "failing to thrive according to standard, well-established caterpillar metrics used globally for the past thousand years and certified as super duper accurate for caterpillars by many respected institutions." is basically gibberish that says damn near nothing about the state of the butterfly's actual health for which we have zero established metrics, having never seen one before.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028732

I'm trying to figure out how to write more about that and mostly failing.

Though I do like your idea of investing in infrastructure. I'm trying to figure out how to provide planning and economic development resources and services to small communities and I really appreciate your observation as food for thought for that effort.

Nevertheless, I do think we know (for the most part) what is going on. It's just that we reached feudal times again (never left them?), where decisions are made by our rulers and as long as the great ruler of america and the great ruler of china are friends, then there is no war. And everything else is waged on the backs of 'The People'. Or something.

On a more serious note, the above comment mentions a job guarantee. That is part of Kelton's MMT proposal. There are two things I don't like about it:

1. MMT is called a theory, but it's actually a descriptive model, and it has shown in the last 3 decades, that it is quite the acurate model. 2. Kelton conflates what MMT teaches us about monetary politics and fiat currencies with her own agenda, namely the job guarantee. And it's hard to argue against the latter, when you acknowledge the first. And that is only possible, because MMT is called a 'theory'.

Nevertheless, I believe you are right DoreenMichele, that we as humans should never stand still. I don't think I could 'not work'. As such a universal job guarantee or public programs are scary to me, because although I like work and won't stop anytime soon, I feel like this will be abused by politicians to cement long working hours. And while I do like work, I think less working hours per person is what we should thrive for. This is a conflict in my head.

I am a fan of UBI, because I don't see myself stopping to work anytime soon, and it would have just relieved me of a lot of stress when I grew up with basically nothing. At the same time, I can see that there are jobs people might not pick up if they had sufficient UBI. Thus these jobs need MUCH higher pay. Because the people doing them (mostly) do them out of passion.

Where does it lead us? Unfortunately where we have always been: the very classical class fight. It's not a grand conspiracy theory, there is no one controlling entity with one mind, but in general laws and law making are skewed towards "havers". Which you might as well just call our new feudal lords.

And until we put up some sorts of guards against (too much) abuse of power, dismantling of democracy, opaque deal-making and abusement of the planet's resources (especially without pay or even subsidized) I don't see it ending anytime soon.

I see this a lot in India where a young woman quickly gets out of a bad relationship and then prefers to be alone than in a bad relationship as she has more economic independence now.