I’ve been wondering the same about a lot of right wing economic policy. Why push for policy that is a net negative for everyone in the long run? I have since realized that it does make sense if you don’t look at it in terms of wealth, but rather in terms of power. The control you have over other people doesn’t depend on your absolute wealth, but rather the relative wealth you have compared to others, and so for someone looking for that kind of power (i.e. most billionaires as far as I can tell) it wouldn’t matter if something they do hurts everybody, as long as it hurts you more than it hurts them.

I strongly believe that our brains are fundamentally just prediction machines. We strive for a specific level of controlled novelty, but for the most part ‘understanding’ (i.e. being able to predict) the world around us is the goal. We get boredom to push us beyond getting too comfortable and simply sitting in the already familiar, and one of the biggest pleasures in life is the ‘aha’ moment when understanding finally clicks in place and we feel we can predict something novel.

I feel this is also why LLMs (ChatGPT etc.) can be so effective working with language, and why they occasionally seem to behave so humanlike – The fundamental mechanism is essentially the same as our brains, if massively more limited. Animal brains continuously adapt to predict sensory input (and to an extent their own output), while LLMs learn to predict a sequence of text tokens during a restricted training period.

It also seems to me the strongest example of this kind of prediction in animals is the noticing (and wariness) when something feels ‘off’ about the environment around us. We can easily sense specific kinds of small changes to our surroundings that signify potential danger, even in seemingly unpredictable natural environments. From an evolutionary perspective this also seems like the most immediately beneficial aspect of this kind of predictive capability. Interstingly, this kind of prediction seems to happen even on the level of individual neurons. As predictive capability improves, it also necessitates an increasingly deep ability to model the world around us, leading to deeper cognition.

This comes to mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_bread

This, and also working part time would become a lot more feasible. I would imagine there would be quite a bit of pressure to improve working conditions as well, which wouldn’t exactly be a bad thing. A lot more hours would be spent on things people consider meaningful, and bullshit jobs would have to be compensated appropriately, which to me feels like a win for society collectively.

One caveat though is that for abolishing minimum wages to be safe the UBI has to be high enough to be actually livable, and would likely be a target of constant politicking. A model I’ve been thinking about would be to set the level of UBI as a percentage of GDP, distributed evenly across the population, which to me would feel fair but may have practical issues I don’t see. It would create a sense of everyone benefiting from collective success, which appeals to me.

Thanks for the BookWyrm recommendation, looks interesting. I have tried LibraryThing before, but it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. I started building my own Goodreads alternative years ago since I couldn’t find anything existing that suited my needs, but unfortunately didn’t ever have the time to properly work on it.