Marc Andreessen who invented the first mainstream internet browser Netscape about UBI nymag/daily/intelligencer/2014/10/marc-andreessen-in-conversation.html And how do you feel about a universal basic income? It is a very interesting idea. There are even libertarians who believe in UBI. They say basically the problem of welfare is you have this massive state apparatus, and you have all this bureaucracy that determines where it goes, and you have all these paternalistic tests by the government to decide what you should be able to, like, eat and what you can buy with food stamps and all this stuff. Forget having that giant government machine. “Just give people the money and let them figure it out on their own” is actually a libertarian argument. Then there is an argument on the other side which is, if you just give people money and they don’t have to work, what percentage of them do you think are actually still going to work? And that depends on your point of view. Well, let’s talk about the nature of work. Keynes said that when everything is automated, we will essentially have no material needs and no need for work. All our food will be delivered or synthetically printed or something— We’re working on that. But it’s not that there’s no longer the need for work. Keynes was writing in the ’20s and ’30s, when it was a serious issue whether you were going to have enough food or whether you were going to have heat in your house. But he fell for the same lump-of-labor fallacy these guys keep falling for, which is the assumption that there is a set of needs that, once you’ve reached them, are done. We’ve got food and clothing and housing, and that’s it, and that’s all we’ll want. We won’t want the spa, we won’t want the psychologist, we won’t want the video game, we won’t want the space tourism, we won’t want artificial organs, we won’t want corneal implants for blind people, we won’t want the hundred thousand new things we’ve discovered. This is the Milton Friedman side of it, which is what I believe. Friedman thought Keynes was wrong20 on this for the same reason I do, which is: Human wants and needs are endless. We’re never satisfied. Go back to Keynes and tell him that every middle-class parent in the U.S. is going to want their kid to take violin lessons.
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 11:00:00 +0000
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