You’ve probably already checked it out. I’ll toss in a few comments.
COWEN: If government spending had to be increased by, say, 20 percent, what would you spend the money on?
My first thought would have been “helicopter drop.” As I see it, government corrupts everything it spends on, so just drop the money from a helicopter (the Universal Basic Income comes close to that).
But on the UBI itself, Roberts says
what really make our hearts sing: pride, dignity, respect. They’re cliches, but they’re not in our model. So we say, “Well, yeah, they’re working in the background.” Or “We’re just holding them constant.” Or “They’re not important for the question I’m looking at.” Then we get to something like universal basic income, where we say, “Okay, we’re worried — because of, say, autonomous vehicles or artificial intelligence — that people aren’t going to be able to find work, but that’s okay. We’ll just give them a check.”
Who would say, “Oh, that’s a good idea. That’s a good substitute for a feeling of pride and agency and responsibility and dignity that a job well done provides”? We’d say, “Well, that’s absurd.” Yet, people on the left and the right have adopted the economist’s view that says there’s a function that translates stuff into well-being. I think that’s just grotesque. Where we’re talking about things I’ve changed on, that’d be a big one.
Here is Russ being profound:
I would say that’s true of marriage and religion. Any one day, you might sometimes think it’s a hard deal. Most days, it’s good or great, and then, more importantly, over a longer period of time, it’s deeply satisfying. I think in today’s world, those two institutions are struggling because for whatever reason, people are more interested in today.
I would say that I found high school teaching like that. On any one day, I might hate it. But over a longer period of time, it was satisfying.
The whole interview was fun to read through.
If we spent 20% of government GDP over ten years, spend it on Treasury defaults. By contract with a non profit New Fed, a 15 year 8 trillion dollar deal. The New Fed defaults 8T over the period, government in return lets large government agencies have direct normal Fed accounts. The New Fed is non profit, offers accounts, congestion priced with free entry and exit. Contract has a renewal option at the termination. This is a Wienerized Nixon shock, designed to expense all the past losses from the boomers, of which the millennials do not have to pay. Let’s us reprice back to Reagan, make a rounder tree trunk.
The three main points in this post: (1) government programs corrupt (2) there is no substitute for pride and agency, (3) things worth having are worth working hard for were translated into fruitful action in the Family Independence Initiative. Roberts recently interviewed the man behind it, Mauricio L Miller. Highly recommended. Instead of looking at the poor in terms, Miller decided to look for each individual family ‘s strengths, invest in their work talents, put them in touch with a local group of similarly situated families to promote sharing and learning and inspiration from success stories, and record the experiences through online journaling. Very anti-patronizing, very pro-autonomy and dignity.
Miller’s book The Alternative: Most of What You Believe About Poverty is Wrong rang true and seems consistent with my own immigrant ancestors experience. Be settling together in a new community built around a church, their own rise from dire poverty was greatly abetted by the social dynamics of the so-often derided small town.
Does “national debt retirement” count as an option for “increased spending” – or are we in a Brewster’s Millions hypothetical?
At any rate, it seems like what Roberts is saying is that instead of a Universal Basic Income counted and paid in dollars, what we really need is Universal Basic Dignity, in which social conditions and incentives are arranged such that if a normal, well-adjusted individual hews to the basic pro-social virtues, rules, and life-script of bourgeois existence of law-abidance, procreative nuclear family formation and maintenace, and routine productive work, he will have a very high probability of obtaining the fundamental elements and factors of social respect and status to generate the psychological satisfactions necessary to provide the movtating influence to encourage paying the costs, making the sacrifices, and exercising the discipline necessary to maintain such a lifestyle.
UBI is indeed a poor and inadeqaute substitute for UBD, and inherently liable to be undermined in its intended effect by the psychological principle of “you can’t get enough of what you don’t really want.” It’s like walking up to someone starving in a famine and handing them a big bag of refined sugar. Better than nothing, they may survive, and it will feel and taste good, but is not the right solution to the real problem, and will cause all kinds of other bad health consequences besides.
The point I’ve been making here lately is that the traditional social organization and cultural and institutional backdrop of our civilization was precisely what delivered such a UBD possibility for a broad swath of the population, from lower–working class to upper-middle class.
Yes, those social technologies were also supplemented by a context of economic conditions that has been gradually slipping away and slowly raising the human capital threshold for unsubsidized labor marketability, but mostly the pillars of cultural UBD have collapsed under the liberalizations and other changes brought about by the implemenation of the moral imperatives of progressive ideology.
Unfortunately there is really no good way to unbreak those eggs or get the toothpaste back in the tube absent a completely radical – and likely ugly and unpleasant – cultural disruption and political upheaval. The ironic way to refer to the immense difficulty of dealing with these issues given out current social structure and what it would require to solve them is to call them “Coup-Complete Problems”.
But in this particular case it is even worse and something like a “Revolution-Complete” or “Jihad-Complete” problem.