[svara]

That's the argument for universal basic income in a nutshell.

I'm not so convinced, I think this comes from the limited mental model of thinking of the economy as a system for making widgets.

Rather, the economy is what happens when a society organizes its member's aggregated needs and desires.

Being a valued member of a community is a rather basic human need. As such, the economy will find novel ways to meet that aggregated desire, if it's not being met anymore by jobs that employ many workers today.

That's a rather unconventional view maybe, but I'm rather convinced it's the right one.

Of course, it leaves all the details open and the path to get there might be rocky.

[marcosdumay]

> As such, the economy will find novel ways to meet that aggregated desire, if it's not being met anymore by jobs that employ many workers today.

I'm sorry. You are claiming that the poor will buy job-alternatives from the market once they don't have a job to sustain themselves?

You seem to be missing a slight power imbalance.

[Teever]

If you could get your hands on a humanoid robot that was capable of repairing itself and with enough time and resources the ability to do full self replication by building up the necessary infrastructure to produce it's raw parts, what is the first thing you would do with it?

I'll tell you what I'd do with it.

I'd ask that genie for more wishes and have it start making copies.

[waynesonfire]

It'll be too expensive, you wont have access to affortable resources.

[Teever]

You expect the cost of a self replicating object to remain out of reach of the average person?

Why don't you think it would follow the same cost curve as integrated circuits?

[sangnoir]

> You expect the cost of a self replicating object to remain out of reach of the average person?

Yes. What's the cost of relocating software, or a movie, or an audio file? Very close to 0 (a few cents at most), and yet observe how much our current system prices each of those items. Capitalism, as practiced today, maximizes profits, not competition, I don't see that changing any time soon

[comex]

And yet none of those items are out of reach of the average person. On the contrary, they’re usually pretty cheap. Precisely because replication costs nothing, the strategy that maximizes profit is to maximize the number of copies sold rather than the amount earned per copy.

You can see similar effects in hardware too, since even without self-replication there are already massive economies of scale. How much does it cost to get access to the output of most advanced chip fabrication technology on the planet? The answer is whatever the price of the latest flagship smartphone is.

[svara]

Not really, no.

First:

Human desire literally knows no bounds, yesterday's luxury is today's basic necessity.

If the prices for many products go towards zero, they'll become uninteresting and new products will be invented for which, for whatever reason, the price can't be zero.

Second:

The aggregated desire of billions of people is a formidable force. Whoever finds a way to satisfy it will have found a way to become incredibly wealthy.

[lesuorac]

> Human desire literally knows no bounds, yesterday's luxury is today's basic necessity.

I hear this quite often but I don't think it's true. I don't think we've quite hit the stopping point yet for consumption but I mean you give somebody 2 Yachts and they'll probably try to sell both of them and bank most of that money. Like ask yourself what'd you do with a 100k, 1M, 10M, 100M, 1B, 10B windfall? Surely at some point you stop spending it on yourself (possible save it in a rainy day fund but w/e; consumption stops).

Of course you give everybody 10M right now it'll cause massive inflation as there isn't enough stuff actually being produced. However, GDP (adjusted for inflation) has been increasing so at some point we'll make more stuff than one can reasonable consume and at that point it'll probably be Wall-E world. However, we are talking about a windfall of 10M which is 151x the US GDP/Capita so assuming current rate of growth remains linear it'll take another 250 years for the Real GDP/Capita to be 10M (~1k in 1790 [1] to ~66k in 2023 => 151 / 66 ~= 2.5).

> If the prices for many products go towards zero, they'll become uninteresting and new products will be invented for which, for whatever reason, the price can't be zero.

I generally like the argument that price (of a competitive good) should reflect the amount of energy it took to create. So if energy becomes significantly cheap in the future I'd expect a lot of new goods to be cheaper than today's goods (which also makes it easier for everybody's consumption to go up). Of course many goods are sold by few suppliers and monopoly pricing reflects the value perceived by the consumer so there's a giant wrench.

[1]: https://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/usgdp/result.php

[svara]

> Surely at some point you stop spending it on yourself

Only for a limited definition of "spending on myself". Self actualization is where desire truly is boundless. 10B is not a lot of money if your goal in life is now to end malaria or build a city on Mars.

Another issue with your thought experiment is that you're now relatively rich. If in some distant future you have the purchasing power of a billionaire of today without being relatively rich, many people will be looking for new ways of outdoing each other.

Of course, consuming zero cost goods is not a measure of wealth, so they'll be consuming whatever isn't zero cost then.

> I generally like the argument that price (of a competitive good) should reflect the amount of energy it took to create.

I don't. The price of physical energy fluctuates with how difficult it is for humans to tap it.

I prefer the mental model that the price reflects the human difficulty - perseverance, pain, time, intelligence, physical force, ... - required to provide something.

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

You naively ignore the power of mentally ill people in our society. The social contract should be continuously improved to weaker their power and marginalize their obsessions but the corporate workplace is a rotting carcass for these dysfunctionally productive people to twist to their ends. They fight losses to their power over others more than anything else. It’s terrifying to watch the banality and casualness that people engage in these antisocial behaviors with.

[ruined]

the economy is a mode of organizing aggregated needs and desires, but it has never been total, and it is only capable of accounting for needs and desires that can be expressed financially.

the past couple centuries have seen a great advancement in application of the economic mode to greater areas of life. there are both clear and nominal benefits and downsides. its advance doesn't necessarily mean it's satisfying equivalent needs and desires, nor that it is more effective or objectively preferable.

it's well-documented that often it has advanced by threats, dispossession, and violence. and it's certainly possible that could continue, or that it might lose ground on some externality, or sustain hegemony by those same tools.

[its_ethan]

I think there's something very true about your idea here.

I don't know that there's really any study or data that would back it up, but if a large amount of people don't have the structure and expectations that employment provides, things would deteriorate quickly.

Obviously there's a spectrum here, and mindless jobs that pay as little as legally allowed aren't exactly providing fulfillment that people need. In any individual case, of course it makes sense to say "why should I/they have to do this? they should be able to chase passions or find other opportunity" but when you talk about that being "granted" to large chunks of the population (happening at essentially the same time).. I don't see it working out super well in the short or long term.

[throwway120385]

It's also a pretty strong argument that the means of production should be taken from the upper class and shared when and if we get to the point where production is limitless.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> Rather, the economy is what happens when a society organizes its member's aggregated needs and desires.

I like that definition.

[petra]

Many jobs don't really offer being valued to those working them.