I actually sort of disagree with that story, if only because I think we will eventually be able to provide for a lot of people’s needs by default.
It’s what people want to have is where the post-scarcity dream breaks down (barring changes to the laws of physics):
In essence, I roughly agree with this claim from the post:
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.”
I actually sort of disagree with that story, if only because I think we will eventually be able to provide for a lot of people’s needs by default.
It’s what people want to have is where the post-scarcity dream breaks down (barring changes to the laws of physics):
In essence, I roughly agree with this claim from the post:
Homeless people sometimes starve, and also freeze in winter.
(But I agree that the fraction of the starving poor was much larger in the past.)