RE: What would a legitimate basic income buy?
As society moves to increasing levels of automation, the number of people required to actually work would fall. This would increase the value of 1 share without requiring additional labor.
This is false. Back in 1850 people thought that the industrial revolution would make many things obsolete. For example people who's business was around horses thought they would starve when faced with the steam engine and trains. They couldn't imagine that the new technology would bring exponentially more jobs and additional opportunities that they could have never imagined.
Same thing applied today. Many people in most of the world have the very basics which is shelter and food. The problem is that we have it in excess and so other needs are created like healthcare services due to immobility, obesity or even old age because of advancements in medical technology. The market always surprises us because our needs evolve in an unimaginable way. For example basic needs today involve talking through a piece of glass and plastic that transmits electrical signals that somehow satisfy our need for socialisation. If you have said that to Manslow when he was creating his pyramid he would have called you crazy.(This is also why Manslow's pyramid is mostly bullshit).
Automation will change nothing. If anything it will increase needs in other means of employment. New businesses that we can't even fathom will emerge. Eventually the laws of nature will create the same market forces as we seen today. The problem is not the economic system but our human nature. The more we move towards a less-human, more mechanical entity that moves towards immortality the more ideas of balance will apply
I would say that your assessment is half true. Once we manage to invent the Star Trek replicator and teleporter powered by renewable energy with no moving parts then clearly the need for additional production would change. Now obviously this is sci-fi, but all automation moves us one step closer to this outcome.
Nothing in life is black and white. There is a continuum. Supply and demand are always at work and that is the heart of my message.
Who is to say that "exploration" of star systems won't be a new currency itself? Abundance in the domain of self sufficiency will create more needs elsewhere. This is self evident from human history.
When everyone has food, shelter, and healthcare covered, then nobody will care to compare themselves to others in respect to these aspects. People always compare themselves with those who have more, and there is always people who have more. (check out today what society's problem is. the "wealth gap". We compare ourselves with the billionaires, not the Somalis.)
The laws of physics apply to us as with everything else in the universe. They create entropy. This is how some end up with more and others with less. Balance is impossible. I don't see how this can be applied in the real world, heck even in theory.
Life is the opposite of entropy. The laws of physics are not actually "laws", but simply best known description for how the world works.
I don't know what "problem" you think cannot be solved is. My stated problem is, "how to divide the world's resources fairly". That is a problem that can be solved for certain definition of "fair" being all men created equal receiving equal opportunity and equal inheritance of the natural resources of the universe.
You have identified a separate problem which is that even if everything was "mathematically fair", people may not perceive things to be fair. That is a truly intractable issue.
Entropy is a matter of perspective. Life for us living things, is not entropic but in the grander scale of things, considering the universe is a few billion years old, it is very much entropic. One can see the dessolate star systems and call them "ordered" and characterise us as "chaotic" since we are the exception to the rule.
Check human history. Any age. The gap in wealth widens as specialisation and industries grow. The reason for this correlation is because the more industries we create the more menial positions we need. The more menial positions we need to cover the less CEO's we need. This is how 1% ends up owning almost everything on the planet. Heck even in feudalism the percentage was more around 10%. In Ancient Egypt the gap between the slaves and the citizens was much smaller. Same applies with ancient Greece.
What is fair for me might not be for you. This is again because of entropy. People grow in different environments, different cultures, have different histories, customs. We cannot possibly come together by means of agreeing with something as generic as "fair".
Nonetheless, we live better lives today compared to any time in human history. The gap actually helps people since we all grow richer and even taste the upper strata once in a while.
Equally as important (and dangerous) is a) who is the arbiter of what is fair and b) who decides who is the arbiter of this fairness?
Basic survival requires food, water and shelter. Beyond that, it is necessarily subjective because there will always be perspective influencing what someone deserves and what others think someone deserves.
Apart from protecting people from starvation, thirst, disease and freezing/burning to death, I'm not sure how a system could be implemented without an opt-in charity component.
That's a good argument for why people will keep creating despite being comfortable survival wise. as it's always been . I'm not sure global/universal basic income is possible or even desireable, actually the incoherence of it is easy to see, when dividing shares, who has the right to bring more share-holders into the world? How many per person?
The only solutions are nationalistic or even fascist by modern standards.
you confuse needs with wants.
Anyway, the increase in production has always outpaced the loss of jobs, so we can easily "loss" jobs for people not working at all and still improve material standard of living (which is arguable more bad then good).
And I am not even talking about bankers who complain that when their non-producing job of shoveling money from A to B and to C in 0,2 seconds does pay them less then half a million of bonuses.
Needs and wants are actually very close together. What is a need for you in the western world is not necessarily for someone else across the African Savanna.
as for the rest that you said, I don't undestand what you are trying to say
Its an answer to kyriacos who wrote:
Back in 1850 people thought that the industrial revolution would make many things obsolete. They couldn't imagine that the new technology would bring exponentially more jobs and additional opportunities that they could have never imagined.
-- and a lot of that additional jobs and production has moved into wants.
Wants and needs are close together, but fairly easy to decide which is which.
Having a heated, dry house is a need. Having triple the space of the people 100 years ago is a want.
Having (preferably quality) food is a need, going out to let someone cook for you is a want.
Having a phone today is often a need. Having a 600$ iPhone instead of a 30$ cheapo is a want.
Having an 30 inch TV is maybe a need (and that is very debatable, that TV is a need), but having a 60+ inch with 300 channels cable is a want, and a very stupid too.
In most cases you can recognize wants as "having MORE" of the same.
"Automation will change nothing. If anything it will increase needs in other means of employment."
The question then is if these other means of employment require the same skills, smartness, knowledge and numbers as the "old" jobs, and if people are willing to pay for their being done by a human. After all, the goal of automation at the moment isn't freeing people of unpleasant jobs to make them happier and pursue other callings, but making unskilled labour, and even skilled labour if at all possible, obsolete.
I just wonder if the minimum skill level required to get or do any job isn't rising. If that is so, new opportunities aren't enough to stop excluding a growing number of people.
we are always goign to have unpleasant jobs. what was an unpleasant job in the 1750's was a dream job a century earlier.