After Universal Basic Income, the Flood
What if we implement UBI and it makes everything worse?
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. Wait, scratch that — he won’t eat for a lifetime. Automation took over and fished the metaphorical seas dry.
Meanwhile, some bold tech leaders pipe up: “I have a brilliant idea. What if we just give everybody fish?”
California Optimistic
When 20,000 people move to L.A. every year to become famous actors and only five of them really make it, it suggests a special kind of optimism on the part of those people and that place, an outlook so extreme that it actually becomes gloomy. California Optimism is an admixture of this hope and desperation. L.A. weather fits the ethos; sunshine every day, as they say, makes a desert.
Imagine falling asleep in the 1990s and waking up today. You nodded off watching the news explain the looming pension crises, making a case for raising the retirement age by letting some really old guy talk about “cost disease.” You wake up in 2017 to discover that all of that actually happened, and now we really are out of money, Baumol is dead, and many “millenials” aren’t sure what the definition of a “pension” is, exactly. Then you read about Universal Basic…
