Oddbean new post about | logout
 Just say “no” to trillions. 
 Was out an about today and had a strange thought. What if the government just gave you all the money you need to spend on anything digitally. You could buy as much food as you want, You could buy any car any possible thing you could legitimately spend money on. It would hurt your social credit score for wasting or upsetting society, But there was no limit, Except that you have to pay so the government goes on into perpetuity. How gross that would be. I think UBI will start with a small limit, But eventually there will be no reason to keep people from spending more and more when there is no challenge to government power. People have no thoughts just vacantly walking around spending money like cattle in a giant pasture of the economy. All monotonous low level employment is automated. Everyone wearing apple vision pro or meta quest goggles ignoring each other. All criminals are arrested by robots. Just mindless obese consumers creating economic activity for the computers to design products around.