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.
[…] r-selection To Begin In Kenya, Courtesy Of Tech Sector […]
God damned leftists and their little social experiments. They are gonna utterly destroy those villages in the long-run, and be praised as saints in the short.
read over on another blog about some 2 week long camping trip in the wilderness with a lot of hippies,(“Rainbow Gathering.” estimated 15K). He said he wanted to watch them ‘build a civilization’ from ground up. Several lessons learned, one that applies here – 90% of humans were lazy and did nothing…. no kitchen set up, no latrine digging, etc. 10% did all that – they also enjoyed all the decision making from who got seconds, to who got the better seats at the entertainment (hint those who worked).
so when we have a UBI, 90% of us will go on to play call of duty or Farmville all day. And in a society where robots DONT do all the other actions for live… it will get ugly fast. But then AC has a word for that.. or a phrase…
The 90% who check into virtual worlds will mine bitcoins for the 10% who don’t.
I used to think favourably of an UBI (granted I used to be a young communist) but with rising automation and falling costs for consumption, knowledge, investment and production, the difficulty of becoming an entrepreneur is falling. Most people could live well as artisans and small farmers, with 3d printers.
However I suspect this won’t happen because the urban population is so malnutritioned that their ability to turn K selected is very limited. This can even be seen politically: some are literally anti wealth, similar in attitude the gangs you mention, and most would prefer to throw away their money on pleasure than on durables. (Economic collapse would certainly change this: idealism is great until you are starving. But I doubt many of them will be able to adapt quickly enough, and most of them would support a new Welfarism, like led to FDR.)
The trend above towards feminisation in purchasing decisions is not just explicable by the removal of women from Men’s authority: Men today are so weak and so low testosterone that they themselves act like women. Further, Democracy, while always being about “empowering” the weak at the expense of the strong, inevitably and always leads to the expansion of R selection and feminisation as more people vote themselves into an unjustifiedly easy life.
If the technocrats achieve their satanic dream of a society fully divorced from reality, and are able to overcome the implosion that is on the way simply by brute forcing technological affluence and ease, then even if the collapse happens, it’s effect on society will be limited.
Thus I expect that, if the collapse can be mollified, and as advanced populations continue to degrade into worthless hedonism (find me an honest girl below 30 who has not done a double penetration threesome), demands for schemes like the UBI will gather pace over time in all democratic societies with industrialised agriculture, which will soon be most Muslim, non Russian countries. However if the collapse does go down as many, including me, are preparing for, then I think we will still see the implementation of these schemes in ways that favour r-selected people, like FDR guaranteeing make-work but confiscating gold.
Either way, as long as satanic Democracy exists(satanic because it places virtue and sin on an equal footing, while money, rather than God, comes to rule life), there is going to be a problem. It is a pity that the most countries don’t have monarchial lines – they can only resort to possibly hereditary but necessarily atheist dictatorships (like Russia, China or Syria). Perhaps some of these dictators could try to claim divine right. Even though most people today in countries with industrialised agriculture are broken atheists dead to God, the presence of good leadership can still alter the climate to at least try to favour the good, e.g. Putin & the Orthodox church.
If Rome could get an Augustus, then perhaps our world could see an Emperor (Trump 😎), but I am deeply pessimistic about the future without changes in agricultural methods and the abolition of democracy. The first is slowly gathering pace as knowledge of the detrimental effect that industrialised agriculture has on humans increases, but as long as democracy exists, I don’t think there will be any structural change that can stop on a societal level what is happening. Democracy is the ultimate tool of the rabbits, and as long as it exists, the world will continue down the path it is on.
This experiment has already been tried on a national level in Britain since 1945.
See your story immediately below.
Free money has destroyed the English working class.
The economic dilemma made inevitable by technology is inescapable. Very few people will be able to “work” under current definitions of economic productivity soon. Advocates of UBI are morons who lack a basic grasp of “what consequences are inevitable from “x” policy?” The only thing stupid people are really good at is creating vast mobs of carbon copies of themselves. Add “democracy” and you have a prescription for inevitable war between the Can’t-or-won’t-do’s and Can-and-are-doing’s.”
Every kid has been forced in school to do group projects. Tomorrow’s productive are the ones that do all the work, the rest coast on that kid’s coattails. The latter will never be satisfied if the former benefit from their natural talents. The future will either be the smart smashing the power of numbers of the mob, or a slide back to barbarism. It’s either a two-tier meritocracy or the stone age.
If UBI ends up leading to the failure of one tiny village, it will be a huge victory for humanity.
Currently, one of the more popular sub reddits available constantly obsesses about UBI and what a great idea it is.
https://www.reddit.com/r/futurology
Read some of the comments there, and realize that this idea has a huge groundswell of support in the first world.