FYI: George McGovern , the Democrat Candidate for President in 1972, promoted a Universal Basic income of 2000 dollars annually as part of his platform. However, in those days most American voters thought it was a bad idea. But like Dr. Thomas Sowell observed, people aren’t as creative as they like to believe, so bad ideas keep getting recycled.
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Over the last two years Silicon Valley has fallen in love with a striking economic theory. As former Facebook executive Sam Lessin wrote recently, “There’s been a dinner-time revival of the old conversation about the inevitable need for a guaranteed basic income in the United States.” It’s ironic that in the heart of winner-take-all venture capital culture, there is a growing call for a massive redistribution of wealth, but if you believe that artificial intelligence and robots will improve dramatically over the next decade, it makes sense to start planning for a society that has little need for human labor.The idea of universal basic income (UBI) has been around for a while, and numerous studies have found that giving cash directly to the poor can be more effective than traditional welfare. But so far no one has actually implemented a program that meets all the requirements of full-fledged UBI. They either didn’t cover everyone in a community, didn’t give enough to meet basic needs, or didn’t last very long. That changed last week, with the announcement of the first full-fledged test of universal basic income by an NGO called GiveDirectly.The New York City-based charity will be giving 6,000 people in randomly selected Kenyan villages a steady flow of cash for the next 10 years. The amount will be similar to past GiveDirectly projects, between $255 and $400 per person, per year. That’s based on the average annual income and meant to cover basic needs like food, shelter, and healthcare. Unlike its earlier projects, these grants are universal, meaning every member of the local population will get the same amount, regardless of their employment status or financial health.“When we started in 2009, people said what you might expect ‘they’ll waste it on alcohol, they’ll stop working’ and that just turns out not to be true. In reality, cash transfers are more effective than many things that we do,” says co-founder Michael Faye. GiveDirectly has been growing rapidly, raising over $100 million since launching, and $52 million last year alone.Faye acknowledges that the tech sector has been a key constituency behind basic income’s recent surge in momentum, and that many donors are “tech people who think robots are going to put people out of jobs.”
Sadly these tech guys know nothing of biology. The real impact of free resources will be epigenetic, and it will manifest generationally. It will be like some Hmong immigrants coming here, having access to wealth that they earn, and working hard their whole lives to provide as much wealth to their family as possible. They do all that, only to see their kids eschew schooling and hard work to join gangs. In the gangs, they seek out quick bursts of dopamine for negligible cost, rather than the sustained hard work necessary to produce a more reliable, but moderated supply of pleasure.
The real test here would be three generations, all provided with free resources, and never having to work for any of it. Combined with the dopamine you can acquire today through the internet, freely available porn, smart phones, social media, movies, video games, delicious food, and now virtual reality, I can almost guarantee that would yield the total destruction of these villages and their people.
The funny thing is, in my opinion there is no better way to completely destroy a culture and its people than to provision them with free resources, and here comes Silicon Valley – our absolute best and brightest.
These villages are probably doing relatively well now. Farmers are producing food, craftsmen are plying trades they learned from their parents – all of these people have found niches which make them of use to their villages, and allow them to survive on their own.
Their amygdalae are kept developed enough to be capable of producing enough force that they will drive adherence to cultural practices, morality, and loyalty to their own tribes. With this program, they may all abandon these economic niches, abandon their unique cultural heritages, lose their morality, and become so fractious as to begin viewing everyone in their tribe as a selfish enemy who needs to be brought in line by some larger governmental force. Then in ten years all the money is suddenly pulled, and their village ends up even more poverty stricken and unable to support itself, while being stricken with in-group fighting, immorality, and malaise, all at the hands of a neurotic population less capable of handling normal stress. These tech guys would literally be better off just buying bulldozers and leveling these villages.
The road to Hell may be paved with the best of intentions, but it takes liberals to be stupid enough to lay all those bricks.
The even funnier thing is, only an understanding of r/K Theory could have saved these villages, had it only caught on a little sooner.
Hopefully we won’t be too late for the US.
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