Universal Basic Incompetence
Last week a watershed study on UBI—Universal Basic Income—was published, which you can find here.
Particularly noteworthy is it was carried out by Sam Altman’s Open Research, a cutout of OpenAI, to test theories of UBI’s potential future impact on society, given that it’s OpenAI’s radical developments in the AI field which threaten to replace the human workforce with machines in the not-so-distant future.
In essence, the study gave $1,000 dollars per month to 1,000 low-income Americans for three years, with another 2,000 people serving as control group with $50 a month. The money was given unconditionally, meaning they could spend it on anything they want, unlike various forms of Welfare with severe restrictions on its usage. It’s said to be the largest scale experiment of its type in America, though there have been others elsewhere, like a well-known UBI pilot study in Finland in 2017.
The researchers aimed to answer a series of questions, such as: would the provision of free money allow underemployed individuals to take more time to search for a better job? Or perhaps seek higher education? Would it allow them to work less in general, and therefore free up time for other activities with a positive spillover?
The results of the study gave some vivid reactions from commentators:
There is a faction interpreting the results with an entirely opposite slant, but let’s first take a look at why the study may forebode a dystopian future.
First, I’ll paste Athan’s truncated summary of the results:
Result 1: UBI participants ended up earning $1,500 less despite being given $12,000 more annually. For every one dollar received, total household income dropped by at least 21 cents.
Result 2: UBI participants stayed unemployed for an extra month compared to those unemployed in the control group.
Result 3: UBI participants worked less and there were no substantive changes in quality of employment. UBI participants did little to improve their education or training to improve their income.
Result 4: UBI participants self-reported increased rates of disability to limit the work they can do.
Two ways to look at these results.
The American Underclass is so worn down that when thrown a life preserver, they could only float rather than paddle to safety. UBI advocates will argue that $1,000 per month wasn’t enough.
Or, Universal Basic Income and its collectivist derivatives are never enough. Work is intrinsically tied to human dignity, happiness and progress.
The principal takeaway is that the experimental group’s income fell by $1,500 per year relative to the control group, with the effects “growing over the course of the study”, implying their income would fall even further.
The program caused a 2.0 percentage point reduction in the extensive margin of labor supply and a 1.3-1.4 hours/week reduction in labor hours for participants. The estimates of the effects of cash on income and labor hours represent an approximately 4-5% decline relative to the control group mean.
So, the participants worked less and made less money. The kneejerk conclusion that’s natural enough to make is that the money “made them lazier”, resulting in their simply working less to play more video games, or something to that effect.
Here’s what the study said on that:
The time diaries and survey questions support the findings for employment. Treated participants primarily use the time gained through working less to increase leisure, also increasing time spent on driving or other transportation and finances, though the effects are modest in magnitude.
The graph shows virtually nothing increasing other than leisure:
One of the main reasons for covering this study is that it dovetails so well with the common theme here, which is that the elites simply do not understand human nature, which leads them to impose crudely thought-out social engineering projects to reshape society in their image, all the while treating humans like experimental mice to be prodded and corralled into the ‘pre-approved’ maze tunnel.
We’ve often talked about how the elites typify a detached aristocratic conception of society which treats humans like a string of code to be tweaked and optimized. It’s why their worldview so perfectly aligns with the modern managerial ‘Longhouse’ paradigm of restructuring the natural, unmappable human anima into a sort of antiseptic DMV or HR mode. It also quite snuggly conforms to our materialist age’s mandate of ‘The Science’, sensitivity, and victim culture which aims to reduce human activity to a sterile, programmable state.
This is a literal war of the Technocratic Machine against human nature itself, in all its flawed, unchartable, and impure chaos. It is the imposition of routine over adventure, regulation over mystery, and a mathematically deterministic model of existence over faith, chance, and fate. It’s the destruction of our ancient calling for the sake of a grotesquely misplaced sympathy for abstracted suffering. Rather than let you suffer the agonies of a papercut on your finger, we’ll force you into a medicated ‘safety’ strapped in perpetuity to a gurney in an inoffensively white-walled room.
It’s the epitome of protecting us ‘from ourselves’ for the sake of an increasingly disconnected moral framework.
But in reality, these diversionary half-measures ignore the real root causes of every moral and social issue of our times.
Ultimately, the question of a societal panacea in the form of a UBI drip-feed to keep us half-consciously plugged in to the commoditized-banking-financial panopticon doesn’t even pass the most basic competency assessments.
Primarily: if the whole question of UBI is being brought up due to AI robots eliminating our jobs, then shouldn’t the very same robots provide so much cheap excess labor that prices then consequently plummet in every economic category? The need for a $1,000 monthly check would be obviated by virtue of rent, food, etc., dropping to the equivalent tune of $1,000 owing to robots making those things cheaper.
After all, Sam Altman himself stated:
Altman’s interest in universal basic income is related to his work as CEO of OpenAI—if AI eliminates jobs, could guaranteed cash help workers who lose their income? In 2021, Altman said he believed AI could generate enough wealth to pay every U.S. adult $13,500 a year. “He was definitely thinking about future labor market changes—not just what happens if robots take jobs, but also a recognition of the challenges we’re facing today with distribution of resources and opportunities across the population,” Rhodes says.
Unfortunately, that’s where the Great Lie of our rent-seeking economy rears its head via the Cantillon Effect. Production costs have already historically plummeted since the ‘80s with the onset of globalization, but the bonanza of corporate extra profits was absorbed for pure greed, being financialized back into the system via derivatives, stock buybacks, executive pay hikes, etc.
A corporation would never re-circulate excess profit back to the little guy if it didn’t have to. We can only expect the age of AI to drive another bubble to be gobbled up by corpos to fund massive buyouts and mergers until only a few megacorps remain to consolidate their control of the globe.
Some have even proposed futures consisting of ‘gamified’ forms of UBI that will see our daily lives be relegated to the plasticity of a cheap mobile sim.
Imagine being forced to complete “quests” and develop “skill trees” outlined by corporate overlords in order to earn your petty dosh. We know such plans have been in development for a long time, what with Microsoft patenting similar quest-based crypto-mining schemes, impelling the human vassal to complete “activities”—don’t you love euphemisms for indentured servitude?—to earn their shabby coin.
It all comes down to the same thing: the elites have no conception of human nature or human chemistry, apart from manipulating it for a narrow transactional purpose. We can credit them with having a good bead on base nature, how to manipulate our basest biological urges for crude ends. But when it comes to actual human dynamics and anthropological understanding of humankind as community, our Silicon Valley patricians know little beyond the sterile dioramas offered by the large-paned glass views of their tech campus courtyards.
It leads to every proposed solution being invariably more coercive, and subversive; being ignorant of human nature forces them to rely on gimmick and artifice. The fundamental issues themselves are left woefully un-redressed. You want to cure homelessness? You address society’s ails at the root cultural level—you don’t invent infantilized gimmicks to have people dancing jigs for a digi-coin that’ll be inflated to nil in a flash.
The conversation has rightfully grown into a question of human dignity, ambitions, fulfillment, and life satisfaction. By forcing humans to subsist on the dole—especially a meager and conditional one—you take away their capacity to attain the kind of human dignity which comes with providing for oneself and one’s family. The kind tied to the civilizational tradition of people earning a place of standing and respect in society, or amongst their local community. Without that, you leave humans deracinated of cultural ties as mere wards of the state; the result is a scientifically sterile society by-committee.
Such schemes operate under the now-typical egalitarian assumption that all human beings yen for some form of abstract advancement or material equality with their peers. The study above is mired in preconceptions that people drip-fed on UBI will aspire to some lofty ‘entrepreneurship’ or self-improvement in the form of higher education, owing to the newly freed-up time the gifted money affords.
This is the height of modern egalitarianist Utopian delusion. It stems from the misconception of human nature mentioned earlier. Modern liberal technocrats, grazed on the ideal that all human variability comes down to social constructs, believe that every individual is an Elon Musk or Albert Einstein in waiting, just a couple handfuls of corporate handouts shy of breaking out into super stardom and worldly significance. It’s an age old lie used to hoodwink society into the disastrous myth of the ‘American Dream’: that anyone can be anything with just the right amount of gumption and elbow grease. In reality, the ruse is designed to conceal a two-tiered system where a hereditary nobility class fat on generational wealth enjoys all the privilege while the biddable commoner sleep-walks through life to the hypnotic siren song of manufactured hope.
It again comes down to ignoring root causes, first principles. Society has grown into a sprawlingly complex Tower of Babel, erected on a bedrock of so much epistemic distortion, layer-caked with myths and obfuscations, criss-crossed with mazes of unspoken schemes, and crowned with a toppling minaret of rent extraction the craven elites can only prop up by plastering on layer after layer of outrageous artifice, like gargoyles of illogic dangling from broken cornices—an unnatural bricolaged horror so elephantine and unwieldy, that it stands to calve into biblical ash at any moment. But no one is honest or brave enough to voice that the only way to realign with the spiritus of our ancient unconscious is to raze the whole thing to the ground and start anew.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Zuckerberg was asked what evidence he had that people actually want to live in this simulated world known as the Metaverse that he pushes so fervently.
“I think people want to connect,” he says, citing no evidence of the assertion. And there lies the problem with modern Silicon Valley tech-archon thinking—they have devised a distantly warped conception of reality based on nothing more than their own idealized assumptions about what humans want, and how human nature itself even fundamentally operates. It’s a flawed Bayesian game based on the rigged profits and growth of their monopolistic empires: after spending decades illegally undercutting competition, the remaining few mega-giants at the top now solipsistically chalk up their “success” to the correctness of their vision of reality and human destiny.
“Our synoptic conception of reality must be the correct one because we have a trillion dollar market cap!”
This is a critically flawed form of logic. When you artificially constrict humanity’s choices, shunting the whole world into a repressive little walled garden, cultivating a culture of fear for every small business that doesn’t want to be cut out and destroyed—like with Google Adsense, for example—the ensuing empire ends up merely representing the product of coercion and forced adoption due to lack of choice, not humanity’s de facto approval of your vision.
People in the comments of the Zuckerberg interview were keen to expose the flaws in his argument. For instance: Zuck strikes the chord of “connecting” to each other as primary motivation for humans. Yet he goes on to pitch his next big idea of “AI influencers” and AI avatars of normal people, which will be programmed to interact with their owner’s ‘community’ on their behalf. If connecting humans is the goal, why push for artificial ‘clones’ of ourselves to take our place in the social continuum? In the grand old tradition of Big Tech double-speak and contradiction, this is the actual opposite of connecting humans; it is distancing us by blurring the social fabric via uncanny valley clone-impersonators all for the sake of boosting monetization potential. Just like the ruling class figured out they could socially engineer women into joining the workforce to double tax revenue for the Cold War-primed MIC, the newly ascendant tech ruling class realizes they can copy-paste us to double-fist the ad-generated revenue.
Use of the word “connect” remains a red herring to conceal this digital paradigm’s true purpose: to keep us plugged in to their cyber ecosystem, generating endless revenue streams for the techno-rentier class. It’s through this lens we can conclude that even the feigned altruism of UBI is nothing more than a stalking horse for keeping us ‘afloat’ just enough to be involuntary participants in the newly-fashioned tech-ecosystem.
This ego-driven assumption model the elites employ to understand the world extends to the homeless population, particularly those pullulating around the palmy Silicon Valley tech-mecca. They understand homeless people as those merely down on their luck, or having suffered some great jumble of misfortunes, but that are people eagerly clambering their way back into regular, structured life as ‘upstanding citizens’. This couldn’t be further from the truth, a fact reflected on by Freddie deBoer in a recent piece:
The trouble, or so I’ve been told, is that like so many of the homeless she refuses help when offered, and both the policy and the culture of institutionalized do-gooding prevent the people who might save her life from doing anything about it. To force help on dying people must not be considered. And for the current generation of said do-gooders, that’s the end of the story. Nothing to be done. For reasons that I find impossible to understand, just utterly senseless, many progressives have decided that forcing help on the homeless and the sick is a worse outcome than simply letting them die. And letting them die is exactly what we’re doing.
The truth is that the majority of homeless people aren’t ‘temporarily displaced’ or ‘underemployed’, but rather people who have voluntarily checked out of a society they no longer feel comfortable, or capable of, navigating. Even if you were to offer them a “job” and a place to live, a good portion of them would turn it down in favor of the purity of the wild.
But ask most Silicon Valley types and they’ll recite you a litany of artificial ‘fixes’—like UBI—to “solve the problem”, as if people are merely transistors on a circuit board to be soldered and rewired at will. The tech-archons simply cannot conceive of a world where society has grown too distorted and unnatural, out of order with time-honored cultural impulses, for people to even bother taking part in it any longer; that’s not to mention most of those dispossessed drifting through that underbelly are long estranged from family, thanks to—once again—that terminal cultural rot which distances us all, and makes us enemies of understanding.
The vast majority of homeless fentanyl addicts are not ‘entrepreneurs-in-waiting’, ready to reinvest their generous UBI scratch into some self-improvement scheme, itself nothing more than another rentier-extraction mechanism which we’re wrung through by the elites to press us into proper, agreeable, state-sanctioned instruments of commerce and financial velocity to grease the global stock casino’s cash conveyor belts. No, many of these people are in fact the grounded ones, most sensitive to the growing dissonance and imbalances, who’ve rebuked the false charade. Of course, some will merely dismiss them as “mentally ill” misfits, but then ask yourself what made them so? In our modern world, mental illness is often a kind of cognitive crash from the unforgiving thorns of the bio-commerce dystopia imposed on us by the techno-materialists.
Just look at how our ruling class treats the homeless; here’s a recent “enough is enough” ultimatum by Gavin Newsome:
The sentiment of his message is clear: “We’ve done our part in throwing printed fiat at them, they don’t want help, so to hell with them!”
See! If you don’t want to play the game, then get off our board—there’s no place for you here!
A modern world for modern sensibilities.
It only goes to affirm the earlier thesis—the elites don’t understand the fundamental nature of civilization at all. Just like in their flawed Myth of Progress, they can only process human existence in a base, materialist framework, always operating under the assumption that every human aspires to the same material heading the hereditary nobility inherits as its birthright. From the valorization of Equity on a mass scale, resulting in destructive social engineering programs from the Great Society era onwards, to the current madness we inhabit, the lever-pullers go on fashioning society into a grand empirical experiment.
Ultimately, what is the real purpose of UBI—not as a program in general, but specifically as a cash injection to individuals? After all, if you wanted to really help people, why wouldn’t you just build them free housing of some sort, which would more than offset the $1,000 monthly equivalent in expenses, and allow them to truly spread their wings without the endemic distress of worrying about rent. But it’s not about that, is it? Consider this: who really ends up with that $1,000? It’s a bit sophistic to imply it’s money for the people—after all, it’ll likely evaporate faster than it can register in their savings, and won’t bring them anything of lasting value. Where does it go, who actually ends up with it? Why, it’s the same corporate cabals, the Black Rock and co., to whom it’s quickly returned when the recipient splurges on some worthless consumerist poison, as he’s designed to do. The stimulus is really more for them, isn’t it? $1,000 is only enough to palm some fleeting triviality, some expendable or consumable dross, which is gone in days.
In the end, that ‘stimulus’ ends up juicing the classic scheme: money velocity, that grand perpetual ferris wheel of the banking system. Just another way to keep the dry-spin cycle running so the banking elite’s trembling house of cards stays upright. Again: why not build something lasting for people instead, if you truly meant to help them? UBI is nothing more than petty scratch meant to be sprung into a lousy coin slot at the back of some shonky gas station casino, to be pumped back into the system piecemeal like any of the other endless rent-seeking instruments, to keep the system lubed and cycling, the dark money whirlpools of velocity-driven volatility speculation gurgling to the glee of the money men.
That’s what it’s really all about, isn’t it?
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Great article, Simplicius.
Digging your claws in a little deeper this time, I'm happy to see :)
Let's break down a few core issues:
1) The "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality was first codified by Horatio Alger. And while it has a million offspring (including "The Secret" and the "Kingdom of Prosperty Gospel"), all equally falacious, it IS resting on one pillar of reality - prior to 300 years ago, there really WAS no way for people to shift up in their "social class" but now there are a tiny percentage of individuals who can. But, at the end of the day, it's like saying "play the lottery to get rich." It does work - but only for a very few.
2) As for the concept of the elites micromanaging every aspect of human behavior, see "Wrench in the Gears" and her blog for a LOT more on this. She calls it the "ant computer," and there are a LOT of very wealthy and powerful corporations/people/universities working to make this happen. And Sam Altman is just the tip of the iceberg.
3) While there are a lot of reasons why people support the building of the ant computer (see point #4 below), the deepest and most fundamental reason has to do with the nature of capitalism itself.
In short, capitalism is converting something worthless (fiat) into something real. For a long time, this involved expanding markets, whether it was new nations to colonize or pushing people to buy 10 items when they need only one. The problem NOW is that they're running out of markets. Already, even things such as air (rights) and rivers and forests are being traded and sold.
So what do you do when every tree and rock is "capitalized" and turned into a tradable commodity and there's nothing left to commoditize? The answer is: commoditize humans. And not just in the crude 1800s way of slavery where all you can do is buy or rent an entire human. No, that just won't suffice.
Every single thing ABOUT that human can be commoditized, including exactly the things measured in that UBI experiment: education levels, hours of employment, driving/transportation, hours of leisure, etc, etc, etc. In other words, a giant "Sims" game where you turn every human activity (including sleep!) and accomplishment into a tradable commodity. It's literally the last frontier for capitalism and thus, their Holy Grail.
4) The ant computer also nicely dovetails with other sinister impulses, including eugenics, Big Pharma profiteering, "do-gooder" impulses to corral the homeless and the "unbanked" back into the system, longtermism, and, of course, a totalitarian one-world government.
But all these are resting on the foundation of an urgent need to save capitalism by commoditizing human beings, including right down to their thoughts (see the "fun" WEF video on that).
5) It's a bit of a misconception that the ancient feudal lords of Europe (or Japan, etc) were completely out of touch with the "peasants." But today's elites certainly are, and the reason for their myopia is precisely because this is the outcome of capitalism.
Because capitalism ALWAYS means that someone gets rich at someone else's expense. You literally have to steal in order to prosper, and if you ask a truly rich person, they'll admit it's true (and that it eats away at their soul, which is why they always either end up repenting and making amends or drowning themselves in ever more gaudy distractions and vice).
5b) To be clear, I'm not a Marxist in any way, shape, or form. All I'm saying is that stealing from your neighbor to prosper is a doomed philosophy (Marxism is doomed for other reasons). And capitalism WILL come crashing down sooner or later. Unfortunately, surviving until that "later" happens is gonna be really, really tough.
TL'DR: Be prepared to be processed into Skynet/the Matrix or else get crushed unless you can find a hole to crawl in and survive until humanity throws off this cancer called civilization.