The AI boom has turned the standard profit margin model on its head, according to Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok—and it’s making the industry’s growth unsustainable.
UBI has been demonstrated to work in test environments that were not able to isolate all externalities. It might work at scale, but that isn’t testable currently; you’d have to have a massive social experiment.
There’s also the problem that UBI would be putting everyone’s entire means for subsistence up to the whims of the government, which I would think would horrify more people. I dont trust my government to fill the potholes, let alone make sure I’m surviving and thriving.
That’s a false dichotomy. I would rather have my subsistence at the whims of the entirety of the country’s economic activity than any government, which is one election away from changing its mind about how much to pay me. Markets are constrained by their environment. If my employer cuts my pay, I can leave and go elsewhere.
The billionaires are responsible for the fact we’re even talking about needing alternative economic systems in the first place. They and the governments are the same people, or at least their representatives.
In my country, we could do so by enforcing laws that are already on the books that exist for this exact purpose. You start with the Sherman Antitrust act and break up any company with more than X% market share in any market they operate in. You enforce the Glass-Steagall and Frank-Dodd acts forbidding conventional banks from investing in speculative markets, and then sit back and watch the economy work like it does in the textbooks.
Of course, all this is predicated on the government functioning. If it does not, the laws are irrelevant and the markets are just lawless warzones with non-corporate entities (like individual humans) acting as the blades of grass underfoot. So, step 1 is to restore the government to the point where the will of the governed is acted upon. Step 2 is the stuff I said above.
UBI has been demonstrated to work in test environments that were not able to isolate all externalities. It might work at scale, but that isn’t testable currently; you’d have to have a massive social experiment.
There’s also the problem that UBI would be putting everyone’s entire means for subsistence up to the whims of the government, which I would think would horrify more people. I dont trust my government to fill the potholes, let alone make sure I’m surviving and thriving.
Your government and mine may be different.
I’d rather have my subsistence at the whims of the government than at the whims of a billionaire business owner.
That’s a false dichotomy. I would rather have my subsistence at the whims of the entirety of the country’s economic activity than any government, which is one election away from changing its mind about how much to pay me. Markets are constrained by their environment. If my employer cuts my pay, I can leave and go elsewhere.
The billionaires are responsible for the fact we’re even talking about needing alternative economic systems in the first place. They and the governments are the same people, or at least their representatives.
Ok, how do we organize that in an equitable manner?
Isn’t that more-or-less what a government is supposed to be?
In my country, we could do so by enforcing laws that are already on the books that exist for this exact purpose. You start with the Sherman Antitrust act and break up any company with more than X% market share in any market they operate in. You enforce the Glass-Steagall and Frank-Dodd acts forbidding conventional banks from investing in speculative markets, and then sit back and watch the economy work like it does in the textbooks.
Of course, all this is predicated on the government functioning. If it does not, the laws are irrelevant and the markets are just lawless warzones with non-corporate entities (like individual humans) acting as the blades of grass underfoot. So, step 1 is to restore the government to the point where the will of the governed is acted upon. Step 2 is the stuff I said above.