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Arnold Kling's avatar

This is an interesting post and Wood from Eden is in general a great substack.

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Yuval Kalugny's avatar

This resonated with me a lot, since my country is currently in turmoil over many issues, one of which is that there is a class of ultra-religious people who do not work and do not participate in society in any constructive way, but still receive considerable subsidies from the government, as they are in the ruling coalition.

So here the situation is much worse than “The simple and boring answer is that no one knows which rules, inspectors and bureaucracy are actually necessary”. Every reasonable person (and even economists ;) ) know that having a large part of the population that doesn't participate in the work-force and is not educated in basic STEM subjects but still receives a large part of the pie is untenable and unreasonable. But political power enables this new "warrior class" to take its unjust share of the spoils in any case.

So I'm less optimistic about UBI. I think that when most people get UBI but are still the powerful majority, they will want more than the Basic. I think they'll want an increasing share of the pie, to the point where it will seriously hurt production.

That's what happened with many of the warrior classes, did it not? The peasants were squeezed to the last drop and when the first drought or flood arrived, the whole economy collapsed and many died. This has happened many times.

So I suppose just "paying them off" would not be enough to stave off the collapse for long. Either we need to find a way to make more of the society productive, or we need to somehow ensure that the majority of the population doesn't enact self-serving laws (which means minority-rule and is probably very problematic from a human-rights angle).

I sure hope that I'm mistaken, though :(

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