Johanna

To reverse this trend of stagnating growth, we must put more capital in the hands of lower income consumers, who will then spend it on things they desire and increase GDP.

My current favorite theory about what's gone wrong since the 1970s is that we stopped innovating to maximize performance and started optimizing for energy (and resource) efficiency. Imagine all the cool shit we're gonna build once we have abundant sources of clean energy...

Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.

In order to improve allocation, we should pay attention to funding models. We may want to improve the models we have, or reallocate our portfolio of them, or bring back old ones that we have left behind, or invent new ones.

Most advocates propose UBI not because we have solved mankind’s big money problems and the next stepping stones clearly lead us to Star Trek. Rather, they advocate for UBI because they foresee even more problems if we do not try something new in the near future to stave off real pain.

Basic jobs don’t help caretakers. (...) Basic jobs once again drops the ball on this problem. If your mother is dying, you can’t be there to help her, because the government is going to make you dig ditches and fill them in again all day to satisfy people’s worry that somebody somewhere might be getting money without doing enough make-work to... See more

The rate at which you learn and progress in the world depends on how willing you are to weigh the merit of new ideas, even if you don’t instinctively like them. Perhaps especially if you don’t like them.