That’s because your individual points all derive from focusing on the wrong things.
What people want is prosperity—the sense of flourishing and being successful at life. Unfortunately, that’s very difficult to measure, because definitions of “success” are idiosyncratic and widely variable. So we measure money as a proxy for prosperity. The problem is, it’s a very bad proxy, one that can actually pull in the opposite direction of the thing it’s supposed to be a proxy for. Which is what appears to be happening here.
You’re trying to look at this from the point of view of macroeconomics, which is the study of large-scale money flows. Money flows. Except that programs like UBI are not designed to optimise money flows, they’re an attempt to improve median prosperity, even if that results in poorer mean financial outcomes.
I admit my previous post was a bit on the hyperbolic side, but you’re treating this as though the situation were a case study in an economics class. Which it isn’t.
That’s because your individual points all derive from focusing on the wrong things.
What people want is prosperity—the sense of flourishing and being successful at life. Unfortunately, that’s very difficult to measure, because definitions of “success” are idiosyncratic and widely variable. So we measure money as a proxy for prosperity. The problem is, it’s a very bad proxy, one that can actually pull in the opposite direction of the thing it’s supposed to be a proxy for. Which is what appears to be happening here.
You’re trying to look at this from the point of view of macroeconomics, which is the study of large-scale money flows. Money flows. Except that programs like UBI are not designed to optimise money flows, they’re an attempt to improve median prosperity, even if that results in poorer mean financial outcomes.
I admit my previous post was a bit on the hyperbolic side, but you’re treating this as though the situation were a case study in an economics class. Which it isn’t.