“Universal Basic Income and Poverty” by Eliezer Yudkowsky

(Crossposted from Twitter)

I'm skeptical that Universal Basic Income can get rid of grinding poverty, since somehow humanity's 100-fold productivity increase (since the days of agriculture) didn't eliminate poverty.

Some of my friends reply, "What do you mean, poverty is still around? 'Poor' people today, in Western countries, have a lot to legitimately be miserable about, don't get me wrong; but they also have amounts of clothing and fabric that only rich merchants could afford a thousand years ago; they often own more than one pair of shoes; why, they even have cellphones, as not even an emperor of the olden days could have had at any price. They're relatively poor, sure, and they have a lot of things to be legitimately sad about. But in what sense is almost-anyone in a high-tech country 'poor' by the standards of a thousand years earlier? Maybe UBI works the same way [...]

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First published:
July 26th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fPvssZk3AoDzXwfwJ/universal-basic-income-and-poverty

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.