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RE: Hi Steemit! Scott Santens here. If you've ever googled "basic income", you may have read something I've written.
Hi Scott, I'd like to hear what you think about
https://steemit.com/futurism/@gabriele-gio/thoughts-on-automated-luxury-communism-universal-basic-income-and-work
I think markets are wonderful (with a few exceptions like healthcare) at distributing goods and services efficiently via the decentralized widely distributed calculation tool we call the price mechanism using supply and demand signals via money. The calculation problem is not an unsolvable problem, but any attempt to centralize calculation will require sufficient computing power and vast data. I don't see us as being able to do that just yet, although I do see the potential down the road.
However, between right now and that unknown point in the future, I think it's mandatory that we sever the connection between work and income, so as to immediately improve how markets function thanks to everyone in those markets having the ability to signal demand, and also open the door to the future you seek by removing the fear of automation so as to accelerate our investments in it.
For more, please read this one of mine: https://medium.com/basic-income/cutting-the-gordian-knot-of-technological-unemployment-with-unconditional-basic-income-e8df7f8eaa16
And also this one: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-santens/humanity-needs-universal-_b_9599198.html
It's great to see you here, Scott. a few years ago you asked me to share my article on Basic Income on Medium in your Basic Income collection ("A basic guaranteed income in the context of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs", http://thedigitalfirehose.blogspot.com/2015/07/a-basic-guaranteed-income-in-context-of.html)). I've republished that article here on Steemit, too. It's great to see things come around again.
I really enjoyed your article. I think your article brings me up to date on the state of automation. I also really liked your point about intrinsic motivation. The studies you cite confirm what I've known for years: people are not born lazy. I know this from my own personal experience watching my own kids. I've found that whenever I want my kids to do a task, I frame it as a challenge, as something they want to do to prove they can do it. And they do it almost every time.
I also noticed your point about decoupling income from effort or performance. Few people talk about it, but it has been noticed by economist Dean Baker, that CEO pay is largely a matter between friends (http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/outlandish-ceo-pay-is-a-matter-between-friends). In other words, wealthy people have no problem determining pay based on something other than value added by the recipient of the pay for other people of the same class or status. For everyone else, determination of pay is an adversarial exercise. There is a certain amount of hypocrisy in their attitudes to be sure, but a UBI would ensure that productivity growth from technology would be returned to the citizens as a sort of dividend.
I have upvoted and resteemed your article, and I'm a new follower. I really look forward to further installments of your writing and wish you a very warm welcome here.
Thank you, and again, I'm a big fan of connecting basic income to Maslow. In fact, there's something that occurred to me recently that I tweeted about but I haven't turned it into a blog post yet. It's the realization that the most important levels of Maslow's Hierarchy are the top, and it's based on suicide. How many people kill themselves because they are hungry? If you're hungry, you're mostly going to do everything you can to find food to not die. Those who kill themselves are often those who find themselves only ever able to reach levels 1 and 2 of Maslow's pyramid. Day after day after day of just surviving... that's what leads to depression and hopelessness.
This idea that people who reach reach level 3 are just going to sit there doing nothing but surviving... it's ridiculous. Everyone wants to reach for more. Everyone wants to pursue something that's important to them, that provides meaning to life. If we just lift everyone up to level 3 as a starting point, we are going to see something not seen since the Renaissance.