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passive_fist comments on Estimate the Cost of Immortality - Less Wrong Discussion

-4 Post author: Algernoq 13 December 2015 11:38AM

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Comment author: passive_fist 21 December 2015 03:28:17AM *  0 points [-]

Did they provide their own food

Indeed they did. This is mentioned in the report.

In fact cash-grant villages were more likely to grow their own food than control villages. A large part of the cash grants were spent on procuring better seeds and upgrading their livestock. Cash-grant villages were also more likely to undertake productive economic activity like starting businesses.

They did undertake trade with other villages, if they wanted to.

However all this is, basically, injection of a bit of capital into a very very poor village and it does not tell us much about what would happen in a more advanced society with the basic income that is, presumably, sufficient to live on.

I think the fact that you say this hints at what may be the crux of the problem. Sure, cultural and socioeconomic differences are a huge factor, but believe it or not, 'advanced societies' do have poor people, and lots of them, and experiments like these hint that a universal basic income cannot simply be dismissed as 'eliminating incentives and leading to mass starvation.'

UBI is obviously not going to do much for rich people.

Comment author: Lumifer 21 December 2015 05:19:11AM 1 point [-]

In fact cash-grant villages were more likely to grow their own food than control villages. A large part of the cash grants were spent on procuring better seeds and upgrading their livestock.

It's not clear that that the villagers were "more likely" to grow food for their own consumption rather than growing cash crops to sell. But if you want to dive into that level of detail, I would like to see the original report with all the data. I don't particulary trust this UNICEF report which looks a bit biased to me.

but believe it or not, 'advanced societies' do have poor people, and lots of them, and experiments like these hint that a universal basic income cannot simply be dismissed as 'eliminating incentives and leading to mass starvation.'

I'm not saying that UBI is a bad idea. I'm not saying it's a good idea, either. At this point I don't know -- I can see both good points and bad points and it's not clear to me how they will balance out in real life. I suspect the details of implementation will make a lot of difference. Those "pilots" that you mention are much too limited to draw any conclusions.

And please go easy on straw, no one claimed that UBI would lead to mass starvation. A full-blown scheme of no property, no money, etc. is likely to and that's what the "will starve" claim referred to.

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