LW - Universal Basic Income and Poverty by Eliezer Yudkowsky

The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Universal Basic Income and Poverty, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on July 26, 2024 on LessWrong.
(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; maybe some people are still comparing themselves to the Joneses, and consider themselves relatively poverty-stricken, and in fact have many things to be sad about; but their actual lives are much wealthier and better, such that poor people today would hardly recognize them.
UBI is still worth doing, if that's the result; even if, afterwards, many people still self-identify as 'poor'."
Or to sum up their answer: "What do you mean, humanity's 100-fold productivity increase, since the days of agriculture, has managed not to eliminate poverty? What people a thousand years ago used to call 'poverty' has essentially disappeared in the high-tech countries. 'Poor' people no longer starve in winter when their farm's food storage runs out.
There's still something we call 'poverty' but that's just because 'poverty' is a moving target, not because there's some real and puzzlingly persistent form of misery that resisted all economic growth, and would also resist redistribution via UBI."
And this is a sensible question; but let me try out a new answer to it.
Consider the imaginary society of Anoxistan, in which every citizen who can't afford better lives in a government-provided 1,000 square-meter apartment; which the government can afford to provide as a fallback, because building skyscrapers is legal in Anoxistan. Anoxistan has free high-quality food (not fast food made of mostly seed oils) available to every citizen, if anyone ever runs out of money to pay for better.
Cities offer free public transit including self-driving cars; Anoxistan has averted that part of the specter of modern poverty in our own world, which is somebody's car constantly breaking down (that they need to get to work and their children's school).
As measured on our own scale, everyone in Anoxistan has enough healthy food, enough living space, heat in winter and cold in summer, huge closets full of clothing, and potable water from faucets at a price that most people don't bother tracking.
Is it possible that most people in Anoxistan are poor?
My (quite sensible and reasonable) friends, I think, on encountering this initial segment of this parable, mentally autocomplete it with the possibility that maybe there's some billionaires in Anoxistan whose frequently televised mansions make everyone else feel poor, because most people only have 1,000-meter houses.
But actually this story is has a completely different twist! You see, I only spoke of food, clothing, housing, water, transit, heat and A/C. I didn't say whether everyone in Anoxistan had enough air to breathe.
In Anoxistan, you see, the planetary atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, and breathable oxygen (O2) is a precious commodity. Almost everyone has to wear respirators at all times; only the 1% can afford to have a whole house full of breathable air, with some oxygen leaking away despite ...