= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Dias comments on On Walmart, And Who Bears Responsibility For the Poor - LessWrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (510)
The traditional argument for B over A (that is, make-work over basic income) used to be that idleness is a vice and industriousness a virtue; that it is better to work than to sit on your ass. This seems like a lost purpose, though — the reason that work is usually better than idleness is that work accomplishes something useful. Work without purpose features prominently in depictions of hell, from the myth of Sisyphus to The Far Side.
A fourth alternative, D, might be "John is paid to take classes and learn skills." John enrolls in art school and learns to make decorative pottery; or goes to math school and learns category theory; or goes to woodsman school and learns to build log cabins and tan squirrel hides; or goes to media-critic school and learns to write essays about reality television; or something else. Sure, there may not be a lot of demand for potters and squirrel leather, but that's okay since the robots provide pretty much everything there is demand for.
However, I realize that in proposing D, I'm probably exposing my own bias for learning as a leisure activity ....
John sits resentfully in a class with a disinterested teacher, both fully aware they are wasting their time...
You could solve this by making the free money conditional on passing exams, but that would be unfair on those who failed.
Which just elucidates that the point of the exercise should be to provide humans with the abundant wealth generated by technological advancement — not to sort humans into deserving ones and undeserving ones, then send the undeserving ones to hell.
I understand the desire to make sure people aren't suffering, but can't we think about the suffering of future generations as well?
Paying for people to do nothing incentives doing nothing; fewer people will participate the more comfortable laying around gets compared to actual work. Worse, removing the natural selective pressures against low-IQ / high time-preference people means they will reproduce and leave the next generation with even more unproductive people for every productive person remaining to have to support. With IQ now negatively correlated with fertility, that's a recipe for genetic disaster and societal collapse.
Buying the happiness of our generation's underclass at the expense of who knows how many of their descendants when the system finally collapses under it's own weight is the opposite of compassion; it's just pushing the suffering far enough into the future that you hope you can't see it anymore. If we really cared about making people comfortable, why shouldn't we look for a solution where we promote the traits which lead people to build their own happiness in the long run?
I thought my other comment was way too terse, and was going to elaborate, but it looks like two people disagree. But anyway: my point is that there are ways to help people now which don't also help them reproduce; education would be the most obvious one. (“Removing the natural selective pressures against low-IQ / high time-preference people” is not what has lead to the observed negative correlation between IQ and fertility; it's not that stupid people have more children than they used to, it's that smart people have fewer.)
Subsidize the hell out of IUDs, or something like that.
You mean paying people for implanting IUDs, and covering the costs involved? That could work, I suppose.
Yes, the subsidies may be so large that the cost to the end users becomes negative.