This is the 4th part in a series about the nature of money now and what that means for a Universal Basic Income. You could read it as a stand-alone thing, but you might miss some subtleties. Plus, reading old writing is kind-of like time travel, and time-travel is a cool superpower that we’ve all wished for on occasion… so here’s your chance to jump on in that DeLorean!
Welcome back, traveller! And jeez, I sure hope you bought some shares in NVIDIA while you were back there, because they’re on an AI-adjacent tear right now!
If you’re all caught up, you’ll have read how money doesn’t really represent value anymore. Money represents either simple existence – life tokens; or influence – power tokens. And there’s an opaque line between them that represents very different experiences for you, and very different outcomes for the larger society you live in.
What’s important to understand is the idea that, below that opaque line, a life token is a thing that provides no real value to its possessor – it just keeps you alive. It’s like putting a value on ordinary air or gravity (which, let’s hope, is not something we want to worry about any time soon on this planet!)
A life token didn’t vote for Facebook privacy breaches. It certainly won’t give you a vote about the introduction of Terminator robots.
Where we cross to power tokens depends very much on how nihilistic your view of human life is:
I assume no sensible person is ok being surrounded by people dying of starvation and exposure, so it’s pretty safe to say, food and shelter are always below the line.
But then we have to start asking if we’re also ok being surrounded by pointless meat automatons, who just eat and take up space, while contributed nothing else? So, we probably want them to have enough to ensure simple social interaction and transport – just so they don’t crap in the streets and electrocute themselves constantly.
And now we might like them to help out a bit? So maybe basic training and healthcare, so they can do some low-skill work and, helpfully, pull 13 hour shifts without having to take too many days off for serious illness.
And then, they’re still not really adding much to society – just helping it tick over – so we’d want them to be able to afford some spare time to partake in hobbies, or community improvement, or bringing up children. So, maybe we land on topping them up so a 40 hour work week is enough for them to get by.
But you could keep going. We could want all our citizens to thrive, and have the mental and temporal space to create, and build businesses, or join the local council, care for elders, and take care of their own mental health. So, maybe a shorter work week?
Or maybe wage work shouldn’t be a requirement for survival and thriving at all in our advanced civilisation? Maybe a good life for all shouldn’t require all to work, and we can just stop conning ourselves into the belief that human flourishing is only possible with an incentive?
In my opinion, it’s only beyond level 5 that money starts being equally valuable across the board. Most base welfare systems sadly only focus on making sure we’ve ticked off level 1.
And so, we’ve arrived back at the UBI and the notion that neither the capitalist or the socialist viewpoint really appreciates it for what it is. The trouble with a UBI presented in political terms, using political justification, is that it inherently fails to appreciate that a UBI doesn’t give anyone anything.
To be fair, modern politics has no interest in things that just restore neutrality to a batshit system. The sheer existence of a batshit system is the exact kind of agitation needed to make modern politics functional - so no-one who’s in it wants it to go away!
Even the name, Universal Basic Income, is the sort-of-bad that only economists can devise: Stuff like ‘Guaranteed Income’ or ‘Freedom Dividends’ are not much better. They all tap into the idea that this is a thing that is somehow individually earned – by being a citizen or whatever – rather than a thing that we actually all benefit from each other having.
To restate the point, money for people below the line means everything. But above the line, it progressively means nothing. And, the fact that both of those two extremes can exist, for the same fundamental social technology of ‘money’, means it is not working as it should.
A UBI which ensures no-one has everything-to-lose restores the power balance simply by ensuring everyone is participating in the same economy. Every dollar becomes a genuine vote; genuine value. Sure, some people will still have many more dollars than others but, when no-one is having to spend dollars under literal life-or-death-level coercion, even those huge piles of dollars have value in a way we all agree on.
I’m not going to get into how we might ‘pay’ for something like a UBI. Hopefully, it’s clear that the volume of money itself is not the real problem here – we can just do some reallocation or print it. Regardless of how you do it though, it’s something we’re going to need to do soon, because we’ve got some challenges ahead of us that really require a fully-engaged population: A Level 5 population (or above!), focused on problem solving, rather than survival.
One final note, and call-back to an earlier footnote, we’re just starting to unleash AI on our world – a technology we can’t begin to understand the consequences of yet. But, while it is not yet clear how it might affect our ability to earn tokens via employment, it is clear that it puts us at risk of even further loss of democratic perspective, fake news, and an astonishing acceleration of data and social change.
Right now the people with power tokens are telling us money will moderate the growth of AI because, they claim, the market is a competitive game with multiple people chasing value… Only, that’s just the sound of keys jingling remember.
Until everyone is able to participate in the same game, it’s a chase for dominance, not value.
By the way, that whistling sound you hear is the accelerating winds of AI change rushing towards you. I’ve got some thoughts…
-T