At the expense of what?

Somebody has to produce all of the things people need and want. Universal basic income holds out the illusory promise of being able to have things you need and want without paying any cost to have them produced--because you aren't paying any cost (in time and effort) to get the income. That's not progress.

Real progress would be improving technology to make the things people need and want cheaper. Imagine if food were as cheap and plentiful as air. Imagine if modern construction methods made it 10 times as easy to build a house as it is now. Imagine if cars could be cranked out on 3D printers. And so on.

But that kind of progress never happens from the top down. It always happens from the bottom up. No top-down program, whether it's UBI or anything else, will help with that kind of progress. It takes actual people doing actual work.

It was. There was a time you could just walk out and pick it off trees.

Food didn't change. We did.

Progress is not a scalar. It's a vector. You must always ask:

Progress towards what?

For some, yes. Others you had to hunt or catch.

> Food didn't change. We did.

If you mean the human population grew to a point where simple hunting and gathering could not support it, and then food changed after that, that's getting things backwards. Our ancestors invented farming, i.e., a new way of producing food, and then the population grew larger than hunting and gathering could support. So food changed first. Then we changed.

> You must always ask:

Progress towards what?

Yes, agreed. Not everyone would consider our ancestors' invention of farming to be progress, for example.

The best interpretation of your comment is that of course I support progress away from blatant human rights violations and genocide.

Though I do suggest you take extra care with grammatical use of the comma (,). :)

If you want innovation and technology to thrive, you will have to notice that valuing money as highly as it is, is detrimental to progress. And if like you said, UBI reduces the value, that's precisely what can help, right?

And governments pay farmers not to grow grain in the first place. These kinds of problems are solved by removing the top-down policies that create them.

> 2. We have planned obsolescence in electronic devices, to increase profits

To the extent this is a problem (and not just in electronic devices, many products are not built to last any more), it's a problem with corporate governance and is not something that is easily solved. The corporate governance problem is that most stock in publicly traded corporations is no longer owned by individuals, it's owned by mutual funds, since that's where most people's retirement savings are now. So the corporate entities that have to meet long time horizons, which is what enables things like building products to last a long time, rather than focusing on short-term profits, are the mutual funds, not the individual corporations--but the mutual funds don't build anything, they just move money around. The actual corporations that build things have short time horizons because the mutual funds will sell their stock if they don't meet the desired short-term returns.

As I said, this problem is not easily solved; certainly UBI does not solve it. Nor will it improve it, since anyone who depends on UBI for their income is not going to be running a corporation anyway. To the extent UBI affects the incentives of the people running corporations at all, it increases their incentive to take short-term profit, since the long-term effect of something like UBI is to make human labor scarcer and more expensive, which means corporations that build things need to either automate or go out of business--so the executives that run them have more incentive to take short-term profits and then exit with their golden parachutes before the long-term problems surface.

> 3. Closed source technology have made it unreasonably hard for small groups with limited funding to innovate

This is only true to the extent that closed source technology is better and would spark innovation if it were open. I do not see this being the case.

> valuing money as highly as it is, is detrimental to progress

I'm not sure I agree. I think what is detrimental to progress is focusing on short term gain rather than long term stability, particularly of the social institutions that are required for progress to occur in the first place. I don't see "valuing money" in and of itself as much of an effect. Many people who "value money" are willing to work for years on startups in order to get rich, producing much innovation and progress.

>> To the extent this is a problem (and not just in electronic devices, many products are not built to last any more), it's a problem with corporate governance and is not something that is easily solved. The corporate governance problem is that most stock in publicly traded corporations is no longer owned by individuals, it's owned by mutual funds, since that's where most people's retirement savings are now. So the corporate entities that have to meet long time horizons, which is what enables things like building products to last a long time, rather than focusing on short-term profits, are the mutual funds, not the individual corporations--but the mutual funds don't build anything, they just move money around. The actual corporations that build things have short time horizons because the mutual funds will sell their stock if they don't meet the desired short-term returns.As I said, this problem is not easily solved; I see where you are coming from, and it makes sense. But you have to admit that the focus of this practice is to increase profits more than increasing value for customers. And that's a consequence of money being of more importance than solving a problem. So the store of value (money) is more "important" than the value the product is supposed to create.. I haven't been really eloquent here but I hope you get where in coming from, even if I might be a bit naive

>>certainly UBI does not solve it. Ofc, it won't. It'll just serve as a buffer instead of socialised Healthcare, housing and more, right?

>> Nor will it improve it, since anyone who depends on UBI for their income is not going to be running a corporation anyway. To the extent UBI affects the incentives of the people running corporations at all, it increases their incentive to take short-term profit, since the long-term effect of something like UBI is to make human labor scarcer and more expensive, which means corporations that build things need to either automate or go out of business--so the executives that run them have more incentive to take short-term profits and then exit with their golden parachutes before the long-term problems surface.

after this short term effect dies down, we would have more efficient corpos in the long tern, right?

And its all gonna "go to the moon" until there's a looming recession and suddenly all the worthless things lose a bunch of value.. (this is my first market cycle, and I see this with NFTs)

>> This is only true to the extent that closed source technology is better and would spark innovation if it were open. No, better or worse aside, walled gardens make it harder to try new things.

>> I'm not sure I agree. I think what is detrimental to progress is focusing on short term gain rather than long term stability, particularly of the social institutions that are required for progress to occur in the first place. I don't see "valuing money" in and of itself as much of an effect. Many people who "value money" are willing to work for years on startups in order to get rich, producing much innovation and progress. Interesting, but I disagree. Imo startup founders who succeed in the long run often place greater importance on creating value for their customers than they value the concept of money. Ofc they still care about it, because, well, obviously

I'd like to thank you for taking the time to reply so thoroughly

Not as long as the governance issue I described exists, no. Things would get worse on average over time but nobody would have any way to fix that.

> its all gonna "go to the moon" until there's a looming recession and suddenly all the worthless things lose a bunch of value

I don't know what you mean by this. There is nothing that guarantees that wealth creation will continue.

> I'd like to thank you for taking the time to reply so thoroughly

You're welcome! And thank you in return for taking the time to read my posts and respond thoughtfully.

I don't know the reasoning behind this, would love to understand in depth, but you're probably right.

>> don't know what you mean by this. I'm taking about how when everyone had excess cash (not excess value) then they spent it on things like NFTs, while a part of the craze saw new money buying NFTs like old money buys yatchs (to get into an exclusive club), a lot of people followed the hype by putting their money into an "asset" that has lost staggering amounts recently as a recession looms ahead because it mostly solves no real problem and creates no real value.

Nice talking to you!

I agree about the goal.

But technology isn't what makes housing near reasonable places to live(employment, good community, etc) expensive.

So given socialized medicine, good public transportation and affordable housing takes us quite close to basic income - when a single adult needed to needed to work less than full time to provide for a family. That is possible in some places in Europe.

And those are centrally managed things.

So it's a combination of bottoms-up and top-down.

In a free market, housing prices are determined by supply and demand. Since location is a key factor in housing, supply is usually restricted at some point, which drives up prices in places that are in high demand. (Technology that enables remote work can help with this, though, by reducing the need for high demand in particular locations.)

However, housing in current developed societies is not a free market. There are many top-down restrictions that artificially restrict supply, and there are government policies like printing money for mortgages that artificially inflate demand. This drives up the price of housing everywhere, but it's at its worst in areas that are already in high demand.

So the best way to improve housing prices, across the board but especially in high demand areas, would be to remove the artificial effects on supply and demand and let the free market work. Which is bottom-up, not top-down. Top-down is hurting, not helping.

> given socialized medicine, good public transportation and affordable housing

Which either don't exist, or only exist because people are willing to pay for them anyway and don't feel gouged by the taxes required--which means that in those societies, those things would exist even in a free market, because people would pay for them anyway. So even where top-down supposedly works, it only works because it's not needed--it's "imposing" things that people would freely choose anyway. That's not an argument for top-down; it's an argument against it.